I had someone visit one of my classes at PSU and describe the backend system as it is being implemented in Pennsylvania. The system that was described acts as one big middle man and interops multiple legacy systems mostly written in COBOL. I was told they have the time constraint of 7 seconds to process approvals, which to me seems like a lot, but I'm sure the older systems are probably the real constraint. If these legacy systems supported modern APIs and data transfer formats, this could probably all fit cleanly into any web framework and you wouldn't need a backend dedicated to doing tricky data cleansing. I hope the plan is to use this system as a shim while they improve the legacy systems.