Did you look into how much work it would take to allow Cisco to accept email addresses longer than 8 chars? That is kind of my point. Like, the work to change the internal systems at Cisco does not get easier depending on who owns the company.

The idea that a problem "looks easy to solve" and therefor the problem is that the people in charge are dumb is a childish way of looking at the world. All of large companies I've worked in / with have dumb restrictions. Everyone knows they are dumb. In my experience they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong but it's true that implementing "obvious" fixes is much, much harder than you might imagine.