I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't distribute risk across many small projects, I'm saying that in this case doing so would not have helped you at all.

I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't distribute risk across many small projects, I'm saying that in this case doing so would not have helped you at all. If you had a competition to build a MVP of healthcare.gov where the requirements didn't get delivered until 48 hours before it was due, then the requirements changed substantially 30 minutes before the cutoff time, none of the teams would have succeeded.