Cannot speak directly to experience of original developers, but I could see moving target as being an issue.
Would love to see our code open sourced someday and be useful to others, especially state exchanges, but that is a long-term goal. Currently we are laser-focused on getting everything ready to ship by next open enrollment.
would be curious to get some answers as-to why this wasn't the path to building the website all along?
I mean, the original site was awarded to CGI Inc without any biding process... and they aren't even a US company. Why did we not have US professionals/companies build this thing the first go-round?
I could have imagined a High-Tech All-Stars sort of thing... each major US tech company sends 1 or 2 representatives to collaborate and work together to build this new long-lasting piece of national infrastructure.
The government procurement process is insanely complex. A full competitive bid process for something of this magnitude would have taken many months at least, and would also make it really hard for consortiums to bid because of the up-front cost. Hence the beltway incumbents (Lockheed, Northrop, IBM, and, yes, CGI though they're much smaller) have a much easier time winning these contracts since knowing how to navigate the contracting process and having existing contract vehicles unfortunately gets you a large part of the way there.
I believe CGI actually got this contract via an IDIQ, which is an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity" contract, allowing HHS to add additional "tasks" to the IDIQ contract as long as its within certain bounds set by the contract, and if it stays within their GSA fee schedule. IDIQs started becoming popular in the 90s as a more expedient way to contract rather than the months-long or even years-long process of a standard competitive bidding process. However, it only really solved the procurement woes for incumbents. I couldn't find the original CGI-Federal contract, but here's at least their press release: http://www.cgi.com/en/CGI-selected-build-US-wide-competitive...
Were the original developers developing against a (mostly) static spec, or were the terms constantly being changed up until October of last year?
Are there any plans to carry this forward and redesign some of the state exchanges?