While the FBI isn't known for being on the technical bleeding edge, and used to bleed a lot for technical screwups, the RCFL's - Regional Computer Forensics Labs - are very much out there on the leading edge of computer forensics technology.
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There are some amazing technical innovations in EnCase and the products built on it. Unfortunately, the company has management issues that result in some very poor decisions in many areas, including deployment of software development resources.
I've been using EnCase for about a decade (including a large portion of that working with the FBI), and I honestly can't think of any amazing technical innovations.
The support for reading .pst files? The fact that it can finally handle filesystems besides FAT32 and NTFS? Certainly not it's stability.
EnCase is very good at what it was designed for, which is basically an idiot-proof way for an investigator to comb through a hard drive looking for search terms.
I would argue that technically EnCase isn't even as good as FTK, which is something that pretty much every third-party evaluation of the two products has shown.
I won't disagree that there are some smart folks working at the FBI, and that's not even counting the ones who spend all their time developing "zoom and enhance" software for photo analysis.
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There are some amazing technical innovations in EnCase and the products built on it. Unfortunately, the company has management issues that result in some very poor decisions in many areas, including deployment of software development resources.