As an aside, when I hear about the problems they're having understanding the legacy data formats, it makes me wonder how far you could get with a high-powered,

As an aside, when I hear about the problems they're having understanding the legacy data formats, it makes me wonder how far you could get with a high-powered, big data NLP system to "parse" the data. Sort of like how Google translate works. There are rules, after all, they're just not written down. Why not let the computer figure them out, with continuous training from people until the computer's accuracy is high enough? I suspect instead they tried to write parsers and trusted "the spec", which was never even right the day it was written down. :)