I do alot of work for research departments, and that is very boring. Its the same 4 types of form validations over and over, and any attempts I've made to try and abstract over any of it to make the work less repetitive and there by increase productivity, is seen as actively hostile or "in non-alignment with current goals and funding"
Some of my issues is with how things operate where I am, I think, I will admit that.
Judging from the previous paragraph, this very much. Initiatives to improve workflows or repetitive tasks being shot down is something I usually just know from big-Corp.
As a side note, if you can't reactor the actual code base to abstract away from what sounds like mostly copy and paste, could you just create a tool that would spit out the form validation code? Pass it form element names, types, constraints and get some delicious code. ;-)