An unsolicited redesign of a big site could give you some nice exposure, but I'm wondering if in the end it's just bad taste to do it, since you don't know anything about the company or the process itself. What do you think about it?

Totally bad taste IMHO using real life example work.

Im working over a year now as the consulting UI/UX guy (3hs a day) on a site with massive exposition and user traffic - i am the only one ux/ui guy, in a team of 15/20 programmers/frontend devs.

what begun as a neat process (i study the relevant process, solve the screen flow and then apply it to the project) its now on a state of "hey we already create this screen, please fix the style", and we end up on a screen with crazy inusable stuff or preloaded components that doesn't make sense at all.

In this case, unwanted redesigns which will be totally unfair, because of the environment of the project makes impossible to do an ideal work, something that could be achieved on that redesign.

I think that's the right word: unfair. Also, I think it's just bad taste because you are basically exposing other colleague or a group of them by saying "hey, look what I think I can do better than this bunch of idiots".

And that were a lot of "I think" hahaha.