I'm skeptical that the culprit is mainly to be found in specific features of the FAA, and the article doesn't seem to provide much causal evidence of that (though I recognize that it's hard to prove that kind of causality). Major upgrades/replacements/migrations either failing or coming in a decade late and billions over budget is the norm in Fortune 500 companies, too, which leads to a hypothesis that it's a more general problem with big rewrites of safety/business-critical systems in large organizations.