Long story below. Consider this your warning.
In the fall of 1992 I designed, from the ground up, an online transaction processing system to do medicaid medicare and private insurance eligibility verifications. All of these came into the datacenter through a dial-up system. (2 channel banks into 2 USRobotics boxes with 24 modems in each). I designed this system so that any component could be swapped out for something bigger, faster, and the system would just carry on. I had multiple paths of redundancy, backup battery power, everything. Planned down to the tiles on the floor in the datacenter. In exchange for this design work and sacrifice they promoted a different guy to VP who did basically NONE of the work. So, I left the company. About 4 years or so ago I met a guy who had just left the company as a developer. I asked him about how things were there, and he told me that in the last couple of years(!) they had FINALLY managed to replace the old system. He described the problems that they were suffering from. All because not only had *I* left, but everyone that I had worked with had left, and no one understood the design. So assumptions were made that were wrong, short-cuts were taken that caused single points of failure, and all sorts of other stupidity. “Where’s this going?” you ask. The company would become Change Healthcare. You know, that company that got hacked a few months ago and took down all the billing systems? Yeah, that was my company. I was employee #16. The system was never designed to be connected to the internet, and it sounds like the shortcuts that the former dev told me about in the main OLTP system were extended to the online servers as well. :-\
The moral of the story, don’t run off the people who not only understand the system, but can also DO the work and get results.
Also, I wrote all the skeleton code. The “Data housed in a local database” server. The “Connect to datacenter over frame-relay” server. The “3270 terminal emulator” server. The “5250 terminal emulator” server. All worked out so that all the devs had to do was “string copies” as one of my then co-workers put it.
Warning noted. Your story has probably played out multiple times. When I was a road warrior consultant, I made GOOD money remediating bad implementations due to use of lowest bid outsourcing and automated code generation. Many times I wondered as I reviewed the situation how such a good conceptual design could be so horribly implemented. I think I have my answer.