I agree, my current employer spent the last five years building a product using mostly overseas developers with one developer over here coordinating and piecing together the code. They treated development as something that just needed to be done, as apposed to treating it like the core of their product (which it is). Now they have a big, slow, behemoth and they've finally brought more developers in house to try to help clean things up. I think that a lot of people tend to treat design and UX the same way, something that just needs to "get done", as apposed to something that (might) be a major piece of your product or service.
