It was in my experience, yeah. Though I don't believe you need someone particularly nasty-minded or manipulative to set up one, which is some of what issendai talks about there. I did a little managing and was pretty terrible at it, and some of it was just not having the perspective (or support) to step back and say, 'hey, wait, this isn't working well.' Which was totally on me, but I certainly didn't intend to set things up the way they eventually played out.

Good managers and good systems people are hard to find, especially in a non-profit that's not paying salaries. And with the amount of scrutiny the OTW and AO3 get in fandom, I can understand how people might be afraid to take a step back and take a long hard look at what is and isn't working. I just hope they can do it, because the organization has a lot of assets, still, and I still like having fics on AO3.