I imagine we're looking at a classic case of Brooks's law where they kept on throwing manpower and time at a problem that could be solved only by increasing the latter and holding the former steady.

Brooks's law is an observation about software project management according to which "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".According to Brooks, an incremental person, when added to a project, makes it take more, not less time. Adding more people to a highly divisible task, such as cleaning rooms in a hotel, decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each other's way). However, other tasks including many specialties in software projects are less divisible; Brooks points out this limited divisibility with another example: while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month".