I came up with a hypothesis about this kind of stuff not too long ago. Once your product becomes sufficiently crappy, nobody in their right mind will want to work on it. Good people will leave to get away from it. The project gets to a point where the badness "rubs off on you". Anyone who cares about their reputation will run from it.

Obviously, you can't write code without developers, so you start scraping the bottom of the barrel to get anyone who will work on it. You get people who don't care about their reputations and/or quality and are only there for a paycheck. You get green people fresh out of school who think everything is always nice and happy, and haven't been beaten down by the harsh reality of the industry yet.

The bozos got to the project, and broke it. Once that happened, the only people willing to work on it are more bozos (and the unfortunate ignorant folks who don't know any better).

I dubbed it "The Bozo Loop". I originally only intended for this to describe a specific situation (Flash), but since then it's become quite clear that it can extend to Java and many other things.