Long ago, I had the job, as an in-house team of one, of coming up with a recommendation for a corporate firewall, back when connecting a corporate intranet to the Internet was considered just barely thinkable.  I did the research and implemented the firewall.   My work was then discarded, and a huge team of outside consultants were brought in at enormous expense.  They recommended the same firewall I did and implemented it a second time.

I never found out what that was all about.  Perhaps there was a turf war going on over my head somewhere, and the point of the outside consultants was that they didn't work for any of the squabbling factions.  I just don't know.