We had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It was starting to show some rough edges and some performance limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the project. It quickly became clear that this project would not bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping on the toes of our expensive diva hires.

Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.