Martin,

I feel your pain but the "bad engineering" was probably mostly due to the bad politics. Engineers don't always (or even regularly) pick the top level requirements. Someone in the big corner office said - make it do thus and such and the engineers probably whined and complained the whole time they tried to do a good job with that horrible requirement set pushed on them. If the corner office wants something stupid the engineers are usually stuck with it no matter how they explain/simplify the basics to someone who doesn't have an understanding of the technical impacts, just the business ones.

Hmmm - I think the above may be a bit slanted but what the heck.

- Eric