Plus I'd argue that more vacation time would mean each employee has a more even spread of the workload. You depend less on individuals, and more on the team.
The stack traces suck sometimes with the metaprogramming. I have never chased down exactly what causes it, but sometimes you'll have lots of library code calls mentioned, and nothing from the application.
I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.
And if people are writing 150 character plus lines, those are really, no joke, a lot harder to read. If the line is going to break anyway, why not just break it yourself at a spot that makes sense?
I'm not sure how to guide you except the FTC's own website on one side, and the European Comission's website in the Competition section ( http://ec.europa.eu/competition/index_en.html ).
The big differences in how things happen lately are not really into how the law is made, but in how (and if) they are applied.
My personnal point of view:
It took a lot of time for the EU to get out of its shell in that area, but now it's doing a very good job comparatively to the rest of the world, and the fact that we are an agreement or still very different countries ends up being a big advantage here: laws are applied without too much protectionnism or preferentiel treatement.
The FTC, on the other hand, seems to me very much more inclined to make sure the USA goes out ahead that to ensure fair market competiton. This is a shoddy deal between two american companies, and what happens is also theoretically not legal by US laws, so why is the EUC dealing with it while the FTC looks away ?
An excellent author on US Competition Law is Richard Posner, a federal judge in Chicago and one of the great intellectuals on the bench. He had a blog (together with an economist) at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ (sadly discontinued after his co-author's death in 2014).
Posner has literally written the book on the US' Antitrust law, and he is one of the rare writers I enjoy reading even when I vehemently disagree (as I do with his proposal for a largely unregulated market in babies).
I think you're neglecting the effect corporate backing can have on encouraging research from people who are less startup-minded and more I-like-knowing-I'll-have-food-on-the-table-minded.
This is an interesting essay on the minds of our ocean-dwelling aliens.