I'm in this position now. I'm not a great developer, and I love learning new tricks, but because I'm billed hourly, am constantly interrupted, and get brought in to useless meetings, I'm left with zero time to learn.
If their business plan doesn't include time for improvements of the processes it's a failure. Leave now. Don't try to make up for their mistakes. They won't see it (positively), let alone reward you for it.
Do good for your old co-workers by recruiting the good ones into the more-functional company.
Fortunately, my group typically allows for 10%-20% of my time to be used for either training (learning new tech/languages) or process improvements (mostly internal tools). Other groups at the company don't have it so lucky, and those are the groups that desperately need improvements.
Every company/division/organization has priorities and while there maybe inefficiencies in their processes, they maybe a minor cost in relation to the other priorities. (I can't believe I actually just played devils advocate/defended this).
This doesn't mean they have to stop and fix every non-problem, but if there's no time budgeted to fix what comes up the first real problem will ruin everything.