Eventually, after many months and at least a couple million dollars, I and three other people got dragged in: another developer (no one lets me do UI code), a good project manager to coordinate with users and management, and a developer/tech lead/manager who had two unique abilities: good at cutting Gordian knots, and having enough political capital to say "no" to people (most people around couldn't say "no" to save their life; I can and do, but nobody listens to me). The latter promptly booted the previous team off the project.

Within four months, we had the new app up and running and in production. I'm told that it has one of the best issue track records in our area, including never having had a sev 1 outage. On the other hand, I have heard some of its current maintainers complain about it not being "up to todays standards" because we deliberately kept it simple rather than adopting a bunch of complexity for resume-padding reasons.

I'm less cynical than you are about the parent comment, largely because I'm watching the same scenario unfold within my own company.

We're on year two of the million-dollar team turning out nothing. I'm in a different department, but my position means I liaise with lots of different people throughout the organization, so I also know that a single dev in a third department is half-way through solving the problem because a ultra-high-level manager doesn't want to wait anymore and will use it as an excuse to can the other team and that department's director.

And this was of course very maintainable, up to todays standards, easy to onboard new hires in, not falling apart in edge cases that weren't part of the demo, code that was audited by multiple developers, it didn't make any shortcuts in terms of security, etc. etc. etc.

Unless you've seen the person's codebase, it's uncharitable for you to assume that it's deficient, perhaps based on your own experiences.

If this scenario can happen in two companies, it might be more common that any of us realize.

What was shown wasn't a demo - it was a full implementation. It was rolled into production weeks after the first showing and AFAIK is still in use 20 years later.

What is there other than "getting things done" (that is, other than bitching about it)?

No, you shouldn't be surprised about this, it's natural that smaller dev teams are actually faster. This is Mythical Man-Month.

Yes, it is just like PHP or Perl or Ruby with the CGI specification.

raesene9 says >" how many classic ASP developers are there now ..."<

Good question! But IMO a web developer could learn classic ASP in a single day!8-))

raesene9 says >"the individual developer has to code all defence,<

Yes, just like PHP or Perl or Python.

But the best way to do this is (and the way consistent with this thread's narrative) is to to develop the final system before you tell the CEO. Oh, and best to have a supervisor for you who does the telling.