Once upon a time, there was an application that needed to be replaced. (Apache mod_perl 1!?) My employer put a team together to do it, a team that was very conc

Once upon a time, there was an application that needed to be replaced. (Apache mod_perl 1!?) My employer put a team together to do it, a team that was very concerned that it be "very maintainable, up to todays standards, easy to onboard new hires in", etc. Unfortunately, they apparently failed to include "working" in there. As the project schedule began to slip, they added more people to the team. Eventually, after many months and at least a couple million dollars, I and three other people got dragged in: another developer (no one lets me do UI code), a good project manager to coordinate with users and management, and a developer/tech lead/manager who had two unique abilities: good at cutting Gordian knots, and having enough political capital to say "no" to people (most people around couldn't say "no" to save their life; I can and do, but nobody listens to me). The latter promptly booted the previous team off the project. Within four months, we had the new app up and running and in production. I'm told that it has one of the best issue track records in our area, including never having had a sev 1 outage. On the other hand, I have heard some of its current maintainers complain about it not being "up to todays standards" because we deliberately kept it simple rather than adopting a bunch of complexity for resume-padding reasons.