[Balero]

It's the expectation that I dislike. Feels like people are resigned to poor systems.

"Hey most public stuff is crap, this is bad" - Fine by me. "Don't make that public, it'll be bad because public stuff is bad" - Not fine. Also it implies the inverse, that private is always good, or at least better.

Good is good. Better is better. Private can be good, and is best for most things. Public can be good, and is best for some things.

[kodablah]

Sure, yet another way to say "expectation" at this point is learning from past mistakes. Is it fine to say "don't give these institutions money that have made bad public stuff"?

I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.

Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).