You can probably dig into the project and pick out thousands or tens of thousands of objective mistakes that someone somewhere is capable of diagnosing and proposing a better solution. And on the same token you can probably do that same for good decisions which someone somewhere thinks would have thought they knew better and attempted to fix what wasn't broken.
This is just the nature of large projects, and well understood in such literature as The Mythical Man Month. And I would submit that it's not technology projects per se, but rather the unforgiving literalness of computer systems that throws the overall systemic failure into stark relief.
As the scope and required knowledge of a project increases, the communication overhead increases non-linearly. Not only must thousands of leaders at every level have access to the right information and make good decisions, they in effect act as a distributed system to specify the technical implementation. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible for all the subordinates to filter the information correctly such that the people at the very top have exactly the right information to make the best decisions.
The reason a couple college kids end up creating something more impressive is because they have the freedom to ignore intractable problems. If you threw Larry and Sergey at this type of problem they would be nobodies today because there's nothing you can do against that wall of legislation. The legal code is like computer code that is never subject to performance benchmarks, the people who touch it (legislators, judges, lawyers) are all well paid and have exactly zero incentive to make it efficient. It's tragic because there are no doubt places where 8-figures could be shaved off the budget if the implementers had channels to the legislators to raise issues that make the system intractable, but unfortunately the legal requirements are done in a too-big-to-fail waterfall fashion where the hopes of ever simplifying the system are slim to none.