I'm often confronted with monks who always worked in the same work environment with long established (cargo) cults and don't understand the usual problems a consultant is facing after seeing a dozen of clients.

Those clients normally call you far to late when the trouble becomes apparent but without being able to understand the underlying problems . They want more hands not brains.

It's hard work to explain to them that what used to "work" for a decade doesn't scale well (like in a much bigger team).

That's especially hard, if you are hired as a Perl Dev and not as a DBA, architect or even manager and don't have the clout to change things.

Nevertheless a well chosen tool which fits into established work patterns can do wonders and help changing these patterns gradually.