That's the thing, it might have been the right call. Take facebook: perhaps if you were on the original engineering team, you could've made the (correct) call that "developing this thing in php won't scale to billions of users! This is the wrong architecture!". And no doubt, a lot of hacks needed to be done, because it wasn't written "correctly" the first time.
On the other hand, if you had written it for 1 billion users from the start, chances are that it wouldn't have ever surpassed 1000k users. And that's a much worse problem to have.
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To take it to your situation - perhaps the leaders really were incompetent; but also, perhaps if you spent more time to do it "right" earlier, the entire project would've been killed. It's hard to know what was the right call.... at least, the project is still alive, so the original call might not have been disastrous.
This was a critical piece of functionality. It was backup software, with deduplication. The feature in question was the ability to delete old backups. We were forced to release without it and then rush to implement something before customers ran out of disk space and started asking for refunds
On the other hand, if you had written it for 1 billion users from the start, chances are that it wouldn't have ever surpassed 1000k users. And that's a much worse problem to have.
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To take it to your situation - perhaps the leaders really were incompetent; but also, perhaps if you spent more time to do it "right" earlier, the entire project would've been killed. It's hard to know what was the right call.... at least, the project is still alive, so the original call might not have been disastrous.