Similar thing.
Had time and autonomy from a client, so took sweet time examining the domain, the existing systems et al. Spent a few months writing the basis and the framework around what will be done, based on years and years of experience I had with bad frameworks and codebases, combined with working on the same domain for their parent company years ago.
And it worked. We delivered features insanely fast, hundreds of forms were migrated, feature generators would create 90% of the boilerplate code and the code was small, readable and neatly clustered. Maintaining it was a piece of cake, leading to us not having enough work after a while so I negotiated our time to half a week for the same money.
After a while, client deemed us too expensive to pay for only 2.5 days of work - after all, how does it make sense - if we are paying them that much, they should work 5 days!
So they cut us out. Two things happened:
1. Devs that got moved to other projects in the company told me they didn't know development could be so smooth and tried to replicate it in future projects, even tho they say it failed a lot of lessons they picked up from the framework were highly relevant in their future careers.
2. The company found a cheaper developer, he said "this is unusable and has to be rewritten" and rewrote it into "clean code", taking longer than the original project took. At least he works 5 days a week now.