The fundamental problem is the same as with business and management research - any useful signal is completely drowned in an ocean of noise. Success of a project depends on the characters of the people involved, connections of the project lead, market timing, sources of funding, luck, current phase of the business cycle, past project experience, marketing and hype, sales teams, relatedness of icons and animations, etc. - more so than on any technical or organizational factor. I've yet to work on a project where technical reasons were at the root cause of the lack of success
You're looking in the wrong place. It's a sort of survivorship bias.
You might not have worked on an individual project where technical reasons were the root cause of failure, but I've seen many projects not happen at all because changing a badly engineered platform was deemed too risky or too expensive, or just couldn't get scheduled because another project - made slower by poor past engineering decisions, but important enough to go ahead anyway - was occupying the team's time.
Focusing on projects and not on platforms and products creates these blinkers.
Couldn't it be that it is much more signal than noise? It might be too many and too densely interconnected to disentangle (yet) though. Being technical people and used to clear cause-relation analyses we might just give up and call it noise?
