To reply to you and jashkenas, we weren't completely delusional. Sure, the project was big and tight, but we were pretty confident that we could nail it; none o

To reply to you and jashkenas, we weren't completely delusional. Sure, the project was big and tight, but we were pretty confident that we could nail it; none of the particulars were new, just the scale and the timeframe. There was never any question of "can we actually do this?", just "can we do this in time?" Hence picking a tool that looked like it might offer some shortcuts. Yeah, it was a hell of a lot of work, but that was always going to be the case, and I accepted the project on those terms. (My post perhaps came across as more extreme than the reality. We delivered. The site works. The code never got to 'unmanageable'. Given the opportunity to refactor this particular site, I'd leave it in Coffee, although I'd rework the build and deployment process.)