> lack of coverage isn't necessarily an indicator of lacking quality.
"lack of coverage" mostly means "untested code".
My experience is that it's very hard to keep untested code to a high quality level.
Any modification that isn't directly justified by a customer feature or a bug fix is frowned upon, because it's hard to tell if it breaks anything ; which means you pile up new features, but you can never modify their design so they fit better together.
When the philosophy is "now it works, let's never touch this module again!", code quality goes down to the toilet.
My experience is that it's very hard to keep untested code to a high quality level. Any modification that isn't directly justified by a customer feature or a bug fix is frowned upon, because it's hard to tell if it breaks anything ; which means you pile up new features, but you can never modify their design so they fit better together.
When the philosophy is "now it works, let's never touch this module again!", code quality goes down to the toilet.