I don't disagree with you at all. For our uses, it was a stupid amount of overkill specced by someone whose job was the same as his hobby. We don't have anywhere near the need to scale that such a system was designed for, the hardware that was specified was very poorly considered, and no maintenance was ever done on it except for daily care and feeding -- which quickly grew to consume all of the previous engineering team's day.

When the previous engineering team was shown the door, the entire system had no maintenance and no path forward. It's an epic management fail, but ... let's just color me cynically and sarcastically surprised that I used "management" and "fail" in the same sentence.