Context is everything, so it depends on the "change". But never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Pre-alpha is not an excuse for improper

Context is everything, so it depends on the "change". But never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Pre-alpha is not an excuse for improper architecture upfront. As I understand it, there is a lot of background integration with various agencies, systems of differing reliability, non-standard interfaces, etc. There are plenty of strategies that can deal with that environment (SOA, asynchronous queueing, etc.) It's quite apparent this first version was not built with much flexibility in mind. Not flexibility regarding requirement changes, but flexibility for dealing with the infrastructure already in place.