Oh, and to make things even more fun, much of the data passed around between back-end processes and vendor apps was done in XML at the time ... and the XML parsing library they used for C was a bit buggy... No one (w|c)ould fix it, which broke some edge cases.

Fun times.

Also, if I had to guess, I suspect another factor in the transition was that C programmers were getting more expensive and harder to find.