I worked on a data management system that basically was a very bad very slow filesystem implementation... That lived on a filesystem. It literally did nothing

I worked on a data management system that basically was a very bad very slow filesystem implementation... That lived on a filesystem. It literally did nothing other than store files on disk and let you access them.. Very slowly. It didn't support subdirectories, so you needed to drop everything into one directory... And an LS on 500 files took about 4 minutes. Everyone at the company hated it, but it was the baby of the VP in charge of engineering, so it stayed. To be clear, it added nothing over just dropping files in a directory.