The reformers in your examples were not the rulers. If the reforms had been pushed personally by the secretary of defense, the equivalent of the "ruler" in that situation, I think you would have seen things play out differently.
*Cough Cough*

Erm, no.

And that's all I'm going to say on a board that on a board that disallows real-world politics.

Well, okay, one point which I should make: When your typical maximum time in the job is four years, you're not going to do much good or much ill. It's the assistant secretaries and the undersecretaries and the principal deputy undersecretaries -- the non-political career lifers -- who make things happen or not. But the guy up top? Personal experience here: When the guy up top is only there for four or so years, the best thing for you to do with ANY idea of his/hers is just hold your breath and carry on as you always have. Because whatever initiative gets started will just barely get off the ground before someone else gets in and it all goes in the rubbish bin to make room for the new guy's ideas. Thing about people at that level : They want to burnish their resumes same as anyone else. Which means they'll make change just for the sake of change so they can say they did something.

Which means that many of the predecessors ideas will go straight to the bin than for no other reason than they WERE the predecessor's ideas. After all, there's a pretty good chance that you not only want to burnish your own credentials, you also want to discredit pretty much everything your predecessor did in the bargain.

Then you move on and someone else does the same to your legacy.

So: No. It's HARD to change an organization, even if you're a lifetime king with unlimited powers in law. Because even if you have the authority to kill any subordinate on a whim, you can still only be in so many places at a time, and you're only as good as the information you receive.

*Hunts for a fantasy example*.

Consider Xykon when he took over Dorukan's dungeon. He moved in with a box of stuff, brought in some new monsters, but even then there were still lawful good sylphs and so forth in the dungeon doing things as they always had. I don't think it made a difference to Xykon, because Xykon wasn't actually interested in governing or ruling anything. Same thing in Gobbotopia -- Xykon is ostensibly the person in charge, but it's redcloak who sets the policies and makes all the decisions. Xykon tried to subvert this using Tsukiko as his agent, and Redcloak killed her because she was going to give Xykon -- the boss of the side -- information that he, redcloak, didn't want her to have.

Xykon can only act on the information he has and, since redcloak controls that information totally, it's Redcloak who really runs gobbotopia. Xykon can enforce edicts like "Don't regenerate your eye" because he personally supervises redcloak every day. But anything else? Things happen as the goblins want them to happen, because Xykon doesn't really care about what they do. All he cares about is being top dog.

Of course, there's no people like that in the REAL world, anywhere, ever :).

Respectfully,

Brian P.