Not an accident- selectivity bias. Ask those hackers to build an app for the USPS, FDA, the DOE or any other agency that imposes strict regulations and has to implement business logic to account for tens of thousands of rules (not an exaggeration) and see how agile and innovative they are. There's a reason that most of these contracts are worth between 7 and 8 figures. That's the kind of manpower required to engineer them.

The point is that you went from v1 to v2, and the major thing that changed was the age and attitude of the team. If that sort of dramatic improvement was only conditional on other aspects of the situation, fine, but that doesn't invalidate the article.