In some sense, yes. Notice that most of the responses to what I've said are immediately negative or dismissive of the idea. If that's the starting point (bad mindset), of course nothing gets fixed and you land where we are today.
My initial approach would be to weed out anyone with that point of view before any work took place (the "not HR friendly" part being to be purposefully exclusionary). The only way a problem of this scope/scale can be solved is by a team of people with extremely thick skin who are comfortable grabbing a beer and telling jokes after they spent the day telling each other to go f*ck themselves.
Anyone who has worked with me knows that I have no issue coming in like a wrecking ball in order to make things happen, when necessary. I've also been involved in some of these migration projects. I think your take on the complexity of these projects (and I do mean inherent complexity, not incidental complexity) and the responses you've received is exceptionally naive.
The amount of wise-cracks and beers your team can handle after a work day is not the determinate factor in success. /Most/ of these organizations /want/ to migrate these systems to something better. There is political will and budget to do so, these are still inglorious multi-decade slogs which cannot fail, ever, because failure means people die. No amount of attitude will change that.
> The amount of wise-cracks and beers your team can handle after a work day is not the determinate factor in success.
Of course it isn't. But it's a starting point for building a team that can deal with what you describe (a decade-plus long timeline, zero room for failure, etc). If the people responsible are more or less insufferable, progress will be extremely difficult, irrespective of how talented they are.
My initial approach would be to weed out anyone with that point of view before any work took place (the "not HR friendly" part being to be purposefully exclusionary). The only way a problem of this scope/scale can be solved is by a team of people with extremely thick skin who are comfortable grabbing a beer and telling jokes after they spent the day telling each other to go f*ck themselves.