Nothing moved very quickly, sometimes a change request took a year from initial writeup to implementation and close-out. It wasn't creative, but it worked. Very well.
Some companies have process and development practices down pat: things go smoothly, and meeting the qualification process objectives is easy, because the work has been done right the whole way.
Other companies have less established or less consistent process. They generally meet the process objectives and deliver a working product, but the development process is often more of a struggle, and there is often a lot of "cleaning up" of missed pieces at the end of the release process.
This is just to say: companies and products in the safety critical space don't necessarily have some intrinsic quality, just a higher minimum bar.
I wouldn't assume that.
You spend more time on less topics: the variety of work is much lower, which some people love, and some people are frustrated by. There is often much less "drastic innovation", or when there is, it takes much longer than you might be used to in other industries. Favor is given to proven, predictable technologies and choices, even if that leaves some opportunities on the table.
That being said, it's something I often miss. The ability to have such solid confidence on the things you've built, and the ability to drop into nearly any piece of the system and have everything be consistent and predictable is a quality in itself. It makes debugging (often VERY rare) issues much more tractable, both at a higher systems level, as well as digging deeper into the code itself.
I feel like this goes two ways too. Sometimes people favor technologies they’ve used before, regardless of how many problems they know it causes.
If it’s predictable that certain tech will cause you issues years down the line, do not choose it again.
The wheels do turn, just slowly.