The note about running SC2 over a file share reminds me of my own experience: In my first professional job I realised their overnight job runs of a custom miss

The note about running SC2 over a file share reminds me of my own experience: In my first professional job I realised their overnight job runs of a custom mission critical optimisation software was actually a VBA program run in MA Access and was also being run over the network share. The databases themselves were small, maybe dozens of MB but not bigger, but the way Access worked is that it would constantly re-read the data over the slow network share. It was also just generally really flaky and would often run into data quality issues. So you'd cue up the routine and half way through it would crash it require restarting everything from scratch. A lot of cursing was heard* around 9am when people started work and found their overnight job had failed. All the developers in the company were distracted trying to develop the "proper" replacement, coded in a "real" language (C# iirc) and server based, but the impression I got was it was stuck in development hell, with all the features anyone wanted always being pushed out to "phase 2", while delivery of "phase 1" was nevertheless always slipping futher away any time anyone asked. As a result the old tools were just left to us "analysts" to use without any maintenance (and most these tools had organically grown out of the analyst team's efforts with spreadsheets rather than being developed by the devs anyway). So I had a poke around and taught myself enough VBA to do some "optimisations", the biggest of which was to simply copy the data locally before executing all the scripts. I also put in an "integrity checker" which checked for common data errors pre-launch. The runtime went from overnight to ~10 minutes, with a ~30 second data check you could run first. I looked like an absolute genius. It eventually dawned on me how disfunctional everything was and I stopped turning up to work, but the impact of those first few weeks of work definitely let me coast the next couple of years. * This detail is an embellishment, the company was oddly strict about this kind of thing. They also still required jacket and tie in their dress code.