All excellent points; I don't disagree with anything except for the last one. > Large company with resources and domain to take a long-term outlook on the prob

All excellent points; I don't disagree with anything except for the last one. > Large company with resources and domain to take a long-term outlook on the problem. My father works for company X that sold this system to banks; UBS and the other big ones didn't have a hand in the development other than testing and specifications. Additionally, company X and their clients suffer from enterprise-levels of political dysfunction and mismanagement, e.g., "let's fire our internal QA team and replace them with underpaid contractors from <insert third world country>. what could go wrong?", "the new system being developed by our new college hire employees in <another insert third world country> is 10 times slower than the old one? Well we'll just run it on 10 times more expensive hardware!" I could go on and on about the general shortsightedness, perhaps in a blog post[1]. Suffice it is to say: probably not the best idea to get signed on at the moment :-) [1] The perhaps is saving me from commitment.