Was the legacy team free from daily responsibilities of maintaining the system or were you at an unfair advantage because you only had to work on new development?
But, one can speculate that if the situation was reversed, and the interns and newbies were forced to maintain the old system and the old hands were given carte blanche to write a new system, that maybe they wouldn't have been as creative or open-minded about it. Or maybe they'd have deeper insights based on their experience? Who knows?
Algol, in contrast, was backed by many international groups and is described as "an attempt by the theoreticians to greatly improve FORTRAN" (by way of all their great, formalized knowledge and 'wisdom').
The seasoned experts always think they have some secret that the upstarts are missing, a special sauce that no "true solution" built by "true engineers" would be without. And then their overengineered designed by committee and compromise solutions stumble out of the garage and collapse in a heap. Meanwhile, those things built by people more motivated by a desire and a passion than by signaling their expertise soar past and into fields and uses their designers never imagined.
I've seen it a lot and have been on both sides. Newly created teams have a massive advantage when it comes to replacing existing systems because they avoid getting bogged down in the details. However, they do invariably miss implementing key features in the new system, leading to a situation where the new system is better than the old one only 80-90% of the time.
Interesting. I recently designed an executable format that runs on seven operating systems and I've definitely been getting that vibe from a lot of my colleagues. I try not to take it personally since I feel like some ideas can only be discovered and the will of technology often isn't our own.