I am fascinated by the psychology of this as much as anything.

Any organisation is a meta-brain, and has emotion running throughout.

Your two examples seem to come after the wheels have fallen off and the magnitude of the problem is evident to all. And they call in a consultant who might see a DAG or (more often I suspect) might see opportunities to sell 120 off shore developers and a rewrite using IBM/Java

But anyway, if you had walked in a year previously with exactly the same plan would you have gotten any traction? A maths heavy white paper explaining why your ideas are the same as theirs but better would have met enormous emotional headwinds.

Maybe our scientific revolution over the past few hundred years is a blip. That does worry me. If better solutions are avoided because of emotional reactions, it costs us all.

Sorry this is starting a lot of thoughts and I should cover them more carefully. thanks for the insight and congratulations- soujds like a fun career !