You're conflating two kinds of people: one type is very talented and perhaps overpaid, the other has connections and has never done a shred of actual productive work in their life.
What were they? Aren't most core Google products on rails, even getting slightly worse over time? And the non-core products just get buried in the desert.
Discussion requires modica of effort on both sides. Don't ask an easily googleable (hah) question on a discussion forum, they're not question and answer sites.