The “empire” cares more about political prestige than it cares or knows about technology.  The empire is setup structurally to create infighting and to stifle team work.  This is done to create the illusion of potential progress but it really just ends with a circle of finger pointing.

The empire is clearly run by a bunch of bureaucrats whose aim is to pacify the masses with bloated software factories.  Why software factories, complicated frameworks, and RAD generated goo?

1. Claimed reuse.  By spending a ton of money on a platform we ensure support and reduce costs by reducing redundancy.  In reality we end up with an overpriced and bloated platform that only gets us 80% of what we need.
2. Feature bullet points.  This supposedly makes the customer feel warm and fuzzy because there are a lot of out of the box features.  In reality most of these bells and whistles will never be used; and to top it these features lock us in to the platform.
3. It makes the empire look professional.  In reality the empire chose the software factory because they really know nothing about software development.  By having a bunch of useless code on the table it gives them something to talk about and hide behind in their endless meetings.
4. Mort can understand it.  Maybe Mort can run the wizard to generate more goo, but what happens when you run into some nasty threading bug on your web server?  Do you just start over? 

The empire assumes the worst of developers; they believe developers are a bunch of lazy interchangeable Morts or parts.  They pander to the lowest common denominator because of high turn over and the inability to attract real engineers who are not only good, but passionate about software development. 

In effect, the empire doesn’t know the difference between a programming God and a Mort.  Even if a God did manage to sneak into their ranks they would surely be stifled by the systems the empire has put into place to protect itself.  The empire stays safe by locking everything down so that nothing moves; the theme here is to avoid risk at all costs (option 1, do nothing).

Therein lies the root cause of evil within the empire, they almost always choose to do nothing because it’s safer, but it’s safer because their alternative to “do nothing” is the “all or nothing” approach.  They choose all or nothing largely because their process and their software is incapable of adapting, once it has shipped its set in stone. 

The calcified software is only mimicking the inflexible process laid down by the empire’s inner PM sanctum*.  Besides the PM’s living and breathing waterfall, the real tragedy is the funding model.  The funding model wants the exact cost of the completed system up front, well before any design, let alone coding has started.  This funding model tied to an arbitrary deadline gets the customer some software, but as it often turns out its not the software the customer needs or wants.  The end goal is not about satisfying the customer or improving the process, the end goal is to stay within budget and to check all the boxes.

With the project complete (according to the Gantt chart) the empire moves on to yet another project to replace the new legacy system just completed, and the circle of software creationalism start anew.

* Interestingly enough the empire’s PM methodology is called Atlas after the great iterative submarine ballistic missile program from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.  The real interesting part of this is that the empire’s methodology is pure waterfall, and is nothing like the Atlas missile program.  In fact some of the stupid PERT calculations used during that program were bogus and only used to satisfy the bureaucrats.