I recently ran into something along the lines of your devolved pentest concept. I have a public facing webapp, and the report came back with a list of "critical" issues that are solved by yum update. Nothing about vulnerability to session jacking or anything along the lines of requiring actual work. I was a few steps removed from the actual testing, so who knows what was lost in translation and it being the first time I've ever had something I worked on pen tested. However, I feel this was more of a script kiddie port scan level of effort vs actually trying to provide useful security advice. The whole process was very disappointing.