Errr, I didn't think you were, and am sorry if I gave that impression.

But I've stumbled across even more confirmation, first from a New York Times article on the 12th that I'm amazed we missed (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start...), which says:

"One highly unusual decision, reached early in the project, proved critical: the Medicare and Medicaid agency assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor."

And then a National Review Online (flagship publication of the Right, going back to 1955) article by a non-specialist who got information from 5 CMMS officials who also aren't software engineering types (but of course all concerned are learning a lot now, as I'm sure most of us did once upon a time). In http://nationalreview.com/corner/361577/assessing-exchanges-... he says they confirm most everything in the NYT article but the also disputed here by eyewitnesses claim that coding didn't start until February. For integration:

"The people I spoke with did all confirm the importance of one other detail in the Times story: that CMS did not hire a general contractor to manage the exchange project but handled that overall technical management task itself. None of the people I spoke with wanted to get into how this decision was made or at what level, but all of them agreed that it was a very bad idea and was at the core of the disaster they have so far experienced."

The above also might have input from the 3 insurance industry people he talked to.

And it's refreshing to see a lot of people put politics somewhat to the side to figure out just what went wrong in project management and software engineering land. The whole nation is getting an education in this, or as the NRO author put it:

"But [the CMMS officials] are policy and management people, not information-technology experts.

This latter point turns out to be quite important. The reaction of these individuals to what has happened in the last two weeks is the reaction of people who are coming to realize that their expectations and understanding of web development were mistaken. They believed (as I did too, I admit) that whatever technical problems the exchange sites encountered at first could be cleared up quickly and simply once things got going—that the contractors developing the websites could just respond to problems on the fly, as they became apparent. It is now increasingly obvious to them that this is simply not how things work, that building a website like this is a matter of exceedingly complex programming and not “design,” and that the problems that plague the federal exchanges (and some state exchanges) are much more severe and fundamental than anything they imagined possible. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fixed, of course, and perhaps even fixed relatively quickly, but it means that at the very least the opening weeks (and quite possibly months) of the Obamacare exchanges will be very different from what either the administration or its critics expected."

Well, its policy type critics. A lot of us expected the common big project screwups, which are hardly confined to the government.