I would absolutely love to know who provided that estimate and how they arrived at that number. I understand that issues are often far more complex than they appear but this just seems ridiculous.
Turns out a bunch of other systems rely on this bug to fetch information, and no-one's entirely sure where they are, who's responsible for them, or what they do. Also the page is auto-generated though some arcane CMS such that it's really hard to figure out how to get the data off that page while keeping it other places where it needs to be, without restructuring the whole thing. Also deployment is manual and you'll need to go back and forth with some unrelated department for months to make it happen. Also there's no testing environment, no information about how to get it running—let alone any useful scripts or config/deployment management—is in the repo or otherwise available at all, and there are no tests. And it's all written in an unholy combination of ASP.NET and Java server pages. And the "database" is a standards-nonconforming CSV.
Yeah maybe the current system is an emalgamation of 20 such cheap solutions accrued over decades. If they are not i a crisis, they should do ot properly
