It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast.
A budget is a budget and all I said was I understood digitizing being down prioritized as a project when you have to get other things done (like SLS).