I think you may have nailed it when you said "scabbed in over the years". No matter how good the original install was, a few decades of changes and repairs will make it look bad unless the "maintenance man" is also a pretty good electrician and that is usually not the case. You start to see plumbing parts where electrical parts belong, penetrations opened up and not properly resealed, conduits field bent with the strapping cut loose and hanging or whatever they needed to do to "git 'r done".
