The comments here remind me of an old Irish joke where a hopelessly lost tourist asks an old man by the side of the road "Can you tell me how to get to Dublin?". After a few minutes thinking, the man replies "Well, you don't want to start from here".
I doubt 37signals wanted to be in a place where an apparently simple change would involve so much work, but that's where they found themselves. They did what they had to do. There's no point snarking about their starting place without knowing how and why they got there.