I empathize. My first full time job out of college was writing filters for a meta search engine (aka screen scraping) in Perl. I basically had to run dozens of different searches against a source, print the HTML, and sit down with a highlighter to identify common things that I could use to write a regex with. This was back in 2000 so there was no way to parse HTML and treat it as XML, there were no CSS selectors to work off of... pure text analysis with regex. No unit tests either. I would often produce less than 5 LOC per *week* of full tested code and they were satisfied with my performance. But I felt horrible.

But... moving on to what you wrote here, it sounds so much like EA had the tools to make things much faster, but their onboarding process was trash, there was no real mentorship and training, and tons of people were very OK with the work taking a lot longer than it needed to. :(

J.Ja