> When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ...
The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project.
If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.
Source: extensive experience on projects with Splunk proserve.
When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.