Nice to hear this happens elsewhere, a colleague and I wrote an alternative interface for some horrible internal web tool. I don't really know why the webtool was so slow, but it took _minutes_ to load data from the database and display it in a table. The table wasn't a real table, it was some fake canvas thing that lagged when you interacted with it, it was basically unusable.
Luckily the tool was writing directly to the database from the client, so we could get the database credentials and query it directly. Things that took minutes now took a few seconds. Plus, the data was append only, so we just cached everything locally and fetched new data only. Super trivial and basic stuff that made a huge difference to performance.
They found out, changed the database credentials and killed our tool. They did eventually make their version better, but it still kinda sucked.
I have a similar war story, from a university. The portal where students see their grades had several full-time consultants working non-stop for a few months and wasn't gonna be ready on time. The interface was confusing, and different campi were different business entities legally, so students required multiple login sessions if they took courses on different buildings (they had to pick a campus at the login page).
Teachers were about to be instructed to give grades to students via e-mail by the Dean.
I then saw the one database table on the teacher's portal DB that contained all the grades and knocked off a new screen in 1-2 hours in an existing system I maintained. A single remote database query, an HTML table, good looking layout. It was easier to use, more secure (SSO and 2FA), more performant, better looking and better-isolated (no DB write access needed).
The biggest hurdle was political, of course. I was probably too slow, to do it, if anything. But I was definitely 300x faster than the consultants.
Luckily the tool was writing directly to the database from the client, so we could get the database credentials and query it directly. Things that took minutes now took a few seconds. Plus, the data was append only, so we just cached everything locally and fetched new data only. Super trivial and basic stuff that made a huge difference to performance.
They found out, changed the database credentials and killed our tool. They did eventually make their version better, but it still kinda sucked.