A quick glance at glassdoor reviews is a decent insight into the troubles at Omni over the past 2 years. You should always take those reviews with a grain of salt of course...
Omni was a haven of some really awesome people and was a great group of engineering, sales, and management. Over the last 2 years through a series of poor decisions, ignoring the engineering staff and senior members of the sales team, management has driven all but a very few people from the ranks. Happiness was the very last thing considered as consultants were often driven to "stick it out" on assignments that could sometimes be downright hostile at the worst end or career dead ends on the more mild side.
I will concede some points in your favor for that. I will counter with the fact that almost no CTO will change there deadlines accordingly, which leads to team burnout/turnover.
With technical debt, each new feature now costs $nx where n is the multiplier for the accrued technical debt. A feature that you need in 2 months to support a market shift now needs 4 months to complete due to technical debt.
The issue with this oversimplified formula is that you cant accurately determine which debt affects which features. For some features it could be zero, and others it could be 100.
However, I do agree that all teams should be carrying an amount of technical debt to be healthy. It shows a certain quality of decision making to balance it well.
All too often though it becomes an excuse to procrastinate and that might as well be gambling.
If you believe technical debt is developers wanting the code to be "perfect", you completely misunderstand what technical debt is.
Technical debt is a collection of choices you and your team make that can have real world impacts on your companies ability to deliver features in the future, can open your company up to hacking, and could make your software less competitive than the rest of the market.
Technical debt is not a loan, it is an anchor. Instead of deferring the debt payment until later, you pay for it with every new feature and eventually your development team will slow to a crawl or the product your building will no longer be cost effective due to rising maintenance costs.
Technical debt is a unknown risk. Look up any "X company was hacked" story and they have all come down to bad choices made by the product team. It could be a developer on your team left there machine unsecured or put in some bad code, or it could be a deferred decision to fix that technical debt until later.
Technical debt confines the space in which you can operate. If the market pivots, but your software is too rigid to keep up with the changing shape of the market you will lose market share or the ability to capitalize on new things.
All companies will have to make hard choices when it comes to technical debt, and no product can be debt-free. But understanding that technical debt is more than your developers whining about code is paramount to being an effective leader in your organization.
Technical debt is less analogous to financial debt, and more like an anchor. You want to move fast to keep up with the market, but your debt slows you down.
Omni was a haven of some really awesome people and was a great group of engineering, sales, and management. Over the last 2 years through a series of poor decisions, ignoring the engineering staff and senior members of the sales team, management has driven all but a very few people from the ranks. Happiness was the very last thing considered as consultants were often driven to "stick it out" on assignments that could sometimes be downright hostile at the worst end or career dead ends on the more mild side.