The part of this story that strikes me as sadly negligent/incompetent is that the designer or manager either didn't bother creating a (good) proof of concept or prototype for what was clearly a fairly radical idea.

Experimenting is a good and positive thing, but only the silliest developer/manager would put experimental ideas into production w/o testing them first, or at least making sure that that more conventional alternatives could be quickly put in place.

Reuse is a good thing, too. Reuse of code via the use of proven APIs, CPAN modules, libraries, etc. is a truly wonderful thing. Stupid/forced/kludgy reuse (remisuse?) is inefficient at its best, and pernicious at its worst.