A project I lead at least ten years ago was all about moving a company away from a COBOL based system- huge piles of money were an option and the timeline was i

A project I lead at least ten years ago was all about moving a company away from a COBOL based system- huge piles of money were an option and the timeline was in the 3-5 year range, and still everyone (myself included) thought there were better options all around. The driving factor was a suite of new services and features they wanted to implement, we came up with a creative way to run parts of the system as proxies to the COBOL applications backing them and to decorate the requests and responses with data from the newer systems. We were done much faster and cheaper, for a project of its scope there were surprisingly few hiccups or post launch rework projects, and we got the end result they could've spent 10x the money to achieve- and all with way lower risk. I'm assuming we were in a fortunate position that the general flow of data could be handled from the various source streams, but I wonder why this isn't at least an option for moving forward from some of these ancient systems. It seems like a good first step, at least.