In any business-critical path trajectory, there are many peaks. It depends on which one is being identified.

I agree with your other observations.  Working with intuit since 1989, I have watched them grow exponentially. That comes with dependency on many employees and battling with delivering a quality product.  They have been pretty good at it. You consider the number of clients they serve.  Rather than their product quality going down, theirs is going up and keeping pace with competing new products out there.  However, they need to do better in responding to the practitioners.