You bring up a lot of valid considerations for designing software at scale. In good engineering, these known unknowns would be considered during the design phas

You bring up a lot of valid considerations for designing software at scale. In good engineering, these known unknowns would be considered during the design phase. If the argument is that those items weren't considered, that is definitionally bad engineering and I think GP is dead-on in their assessment of Shadow's development. If the argument is that there were unknown unknowns that caused the app to malfunction and the items you listed were just examples, and we don't actually know what went wrong - well, I'll be happy to read the post-mortem. But that's not what happened here. This wasn't an "unreliable vendor on Sunday" situation, or a "we couldn't budget for offline local storage for rural internet". This was a "our app literally doesn't even let users log in" scenario, and I find that really difficult to excuse under the blanket of "political software is hard."