My experience has been similar in the past. In more recent times I've seen numerous products rewritten from scratch by completely new teams on different contin

My experience has been similar in the past. In more recent times I've seen numerous products rewritten from scratch by completely new teams on different continents - the mindset being that they would do things "properly" - only to encounter all the problems that the original teams had to deal with, and re-implement the same mistakes, but in a different language. In one case, the new team quit to a man ( and obviously, the old team were nolonger around either ), resulting in the loss of two complete product implementations, and all the domain and implementation knowledge.