[doorstar]

Have you ever worked at a company where they bring in a brand-new CTO or Lead Architect and they decide after a week or so that the entire dev org has been Doing it Wrong and it's only them, with their clear outsider's view, that can see the true way forward.

I certainly have. It usually leads to 3-4 wasted years of dev time on the brand new architecture that will never match all the features of the old stack, and during that time the old stack has fewer and fewer resources and the tech debt piles up.

It is absurdly easy to come up with a better plan in 10 minutes if you have absolutely no idea how it really works or how complicated it really is.

[eloff]

Yes, I agree that the fair default assumption is I just don't understand the true complexity of the problem. And this is certainly true.

However, I don't accept this answer. I think most of the time the government's plan is so bad, so glaringly flawed, that even from my position of ignorance, I'm confident I can beat it without hardly trying.

[ModernMech]

The plans Congress comes up with look like shit from your perspective because to you, a good plan is one that solves problems for regular Americans. Congress does not work for regular Americans. The plans they come up with are great plans for the people they work for. They are highly effective and channeling money to the rich and their corporations. Just look at the trend lines of the past 40 years - consistently increasing inequality between rich and poor. That kind of consistent performance is by design. As always, the purpose of a system is is what it does.