[GordonS]

I understand that, and plenty times myself I've "done the simplest" thing - sometimes you need to ship an MVP, fast.

The difference here is that what they did wasn't even the simplest thing - it was a crazy, insanely wasteful thing that just happened to work for a while. Being honest, for me, it's an indefensible approach.

> Why should they worry about $100k or whatever when they're funded for > $350M? Their bottleneck is engineer hours, not dollars

Arg, but this rubs me up the wrong way! Any half-way competent engineer could have built something simpler and much more performant, and likely in many less hours too. Sometimes stopping, thinking and discussing for a few minutes or hours will save numerous hours. I mean, how many hours did they spend on this "diagnosis" alone?