Oh, and to make things even more fun, much of the data passed around between back-end processes and vendor apps was done in XML at the time ... and the XML pars

Oh, and to make things even more fun, much of the data passed around between back-end processes and vendor apps was done in XML at the time ... and the XML parsing library they used for C was a bit buggy... No one (w|c)ould fix it, which broke some edge cases. Fun times. Also, if I had to guess, I suspect another factor in the transition was that C programmers were getting more expensive and harder to find.