Your thoughts as to why the changes came about would have been my own first guesses, without knowing the situation. You are right, it might be a lost cause but I still see a longshot pitch due to the "opportunities" I've seen you describe (e.g. recently occurred, Java productivity vs Ruby productivity, new devs don't know Spring, scrapping codebase(s), etc). Some thoughts:
- Determine/guess the costs of the outsourcing and use it as the base for your
pitch. (i.e. what can I do with ~200k for my own pitch)
- They are open to shifting things off-site, use this to your advantage. Rails
devs are hard to find? What about a distributed team of talented Rails
developers? No longer are you restricted to a ~50 mile radius. Depending upon
your location, you might have a higher cost of living than remote developers
which is in your favor. Your candidate pool is now huge. Etc
- Fewer/more talented developers over more/less talented developers who
don't even know the framework (Spring).
In all honesty, I'd expect the pitch to fail given the number of seemingly poor decisions made up higher to date. I am curious, is the software being developed an expense for the company or does it make money for the company? I'd expect the former, given the descriptions. Tip: If you can, work for projects that make companies money and are not seen as an expense. That subtle difference has huge impacts on management, pay, decision making, etc.