It's just that they're only seeing money to build and a place to make excuses on being late.

If you hire your own people you can make them feel how well the business is doing and get features out the door tomorrow and build to the larger thing over time.

Just like IBM, they are big enough that no one ever got fired for buying them.

I've also found they do a good job of getting cadre of executives that float between companies hiring them when they move between companies while they get wined and dined.

I am not OP and am not speaking for them.

"A $30 million mess-up" can look like (at least) two things. It can be $30 million was spent on a project that earned $0 revenue and was ultimately canceled, or it can look like $x was spent on a project to win a $30 million contract but a competitor won the contract instead.

Teams of consultants on site, some remote, and many offshore. Tons of documents are created and many environments and DevOps pipelines are stood up. First code release is when the people who push buttons touch the system for the first time. It is crap. Several more code releases attempt to make the system usable. Eventually another consultant or two are brought to evaluate the project and they say the project violated every best practice and common sense rule. Most egregiously the internal stakeholders who voiced serious concerns at the beginning of the project were dismissed or forced out etc.