The lawyers and accountants were doing overtime, those are all billable hours.
But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it. If their goal was go "make it go away" then what looks like "bad" on the outside can be "good" on the inside. If their goal was to get a team to build something they didn't yet have a team that could build, it might also be "good" in a way you and I couldn't see.