You have a lot of survivorship bias in your post here. Having lived, albeit briefly in the software industry of the 90s, the world was full of massively overbud

You have a lot of survivorship bias in your post here. Having lived, albeit briefly in the software industry of the 90s, the world was full of massively overbudgeted, multi-million dollar messes. 22 years ago, I was working on software to run a single state's fish and game licensing. We had 4 product managers (backend, admin, retail-front-end, consumer-web), 6-8 architects, at least 10 project managers and probably 70+ engineers, 30+ QA engineers. It had its specs written by a separate group for 6 months, that was then thrown away, and then rebuilt using Rational Unified Process. It was 10x over budget money-wise and 3x time wise. It took around 3 years to release to the public. Those four products, back-end team wrote in pure Oracle stored procedures. the retail-front-end team wrote in 95% JSPs, with a small library of java functions. When logic needed to split amoungst 4 types of licenses, they copied pasted an entire 2000 line JSP over and changed minor code, then just forwarded to the right JSP depending on the type. The consumer-web code was written in Perl, which needed to call functions in the retail-front-end, so the solution was to wrap the JSP code, call them with, what we would call now, mocked request/response objects. The PERL software called this mess using SOAP. So care had to be strip down every interface to use primitive objects so PERL and Java could talk. The admin-code, my team, wrote in our own Java MVC framework, Struts was just created. What started as a web-project turned into a 'recreate the mainframe interface using html' though. So yeah, 30 years ago, we did things right, or perhaps you meant 50 years ago?