Sounds like you came through frustrated cynicism yourself to a kind of enlightened optimism and want to call it realist. I really appreciate this point of view and I'd like to get there myself, but here's the rub:
> tide-coming-in approach over several years
This phrase does a bunch of work, and seems to almost agree with the cynical perspective that individual small positive changes (or the more common failed attempt at the same) are futile. But if the difference between optimism and cynicism was only a matter of being patient and persistent, then we should be able to observe things getting better over time in a relatively consistent way.
Is that happening? Honest question, what large organizations can we point to that are better or more effective than they were 5, 10, 50 years ago? (And: for any situations where improvement happened, was it really a tiny number of engaged participants doing bottom-up change, or was it top-down change by some kind of executive decree?)
Youth without perspective will have a hard time answering maybe, but if the youth and wise old heads are both trending cynical at the same time then maybe the cynical position is actually true, and patience/perspective are simply not as relevant as the optimist would hope. My own experience is probably somewhere between youth/wisdom, and I tend to avoid large orgs as much as possible! But as an outsider, it looks like large orgs are all dysfunctional by default and only get more dysfunctional over time, with or without external pressures forcing that situation. Maybe there's a bureaucratic version of the laws of thermodynamics at work here.. the phenomenon of entropy isn't really cynical or optimistic or pessimistic after all, it's just the way things are.