First, I understand your pain. I once worked on a team building a product for a multi billion silicon valley company only to have to project cancelled on the very evening before launch.

It sucked and I felt cheated. It took a long time for me to realize that I had been paid to do what I did and they choose to throw the work away, but it was theirs to discard.

With respect to Real ID, it is a stupid program and should be scrapped. It is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to stick a scarlet letter on immigrants.

Here's the thing though, every legal immigrant and likely many illegal immigrants already have documents like green cards and passports they can use rather to fly.

In the end, this program places the overwhelming burden on US citizens who dont already have a passport (the poorest 66% of us), doing very little to actually make air travel safer.

RealID is the expensive side asymmetric response to an imagined problem that we cant possibly spend our way out of. In fact, throwing money away like this is exactly what the bad guys want.