Um, I went through US Army boot camp in '99, and this statement no longer applies (it may have during Vietnam), at least in my experience. Flutter kicks (a common exercise) and long marches were the most brutal thing inflicted upon us. I spent half the time in a classroom, where morality and law were emphasized. Drill sergeants were not permitted to inflict violence upon us. My own actually crossed the line and hit me, and was demoted and removed from the training role.

The Army may have screwed things up during Vietnam, but they've gone a long way towards fixing it.

Sales Tax is a great big clusterfuck. I've been working in the niche-industry of "sales tax calculation software". A few things to keep in mind:
Address-relevancy varies by jurisdiction (tax law). Ship From, Ship To, Placement Location, Approval Location, where ownership transition occurs, type of customer, tax exemptions, etc all play into it.
State, County, City, Local, and "special" tax districts exist in the US, and each can have potentially different rules
Different goods and services can have differing tax laws, even within the same transaction.
Tax isn't always a set percent, some laws include tiered tax, tax on tax, etc

That's just the tip of the issue. A brick and mortar store that sells product type X at location Y and doesn't deliver has a rather easy job of calculating sales tax. But even tracking all the tax rules within a single state can be daunting. This company has a team of 25+ people who do nothing but monitor tax law changes and research current issues with the company's understanding of tax, all to keep Sales and Use tax software capable of following the laws.

The electric company is burning fuel to generate that electricity. The water company is pumping a finite though renewing supply of water to you.
The ISPs aren't mining a finite supply of bits from the great bit mines of the Rockies.
Being a utility has more to do with providing infrastructure than it does with how things are priced.

Does flag footbool provide a watered-down gaming experience? (See NFL)
Do softball or kickball provide a watered-down gaming experience? (See MLB)
Does "horse" provide a watered-down basketball experience? (See NBA)

That's so depressing, heh.

I guess my optimistic side would have expected the "architect" to know better. You'd think that by the point a person has managed to gain that title, they'd have enough overall experience that they don't just grab random idea A off of random page B and spend two weeks trying it without actually validating the idea. You've described an entire team that was doomed regardless of their knowledge of any one concept. Sounds like a group of people that went in for the money, not because they actually care to learn about what they do.

Mad giggles

You hit the real problem right there. The people who do that crap decide that their theoretical clever trick is better than the design on the system they're working within. Even if such "clever" ideas were actually an optimization at some time, they're bad design, and they conflict with future improvements to the underlying platform.

It's really just arrogance. Few of the people who do such things (such as in the parent post or the Wallys) really have the background knowledge to know whether it's a good idea. They just assume they're better than whoever built the platform they're on.

To go back to the original point, knowing data structures is great, but the problem is often the people who "don't know what they don't know" and don't acknowledge the fact.

I'd say the problem is often simpler than that. It's not so much that they don't know how to develop software, it's that they don't even know they're actually doing it, right or wrong. Many seem to just estimate (translation: guess) based on how they "feel" things are going.

At the least, a programmer who is both good and honest is going to scrape together some hard data and code to generate his "guesses".