Second, the "developer who started that" were the founders. One had worked at Microsoft, and so was very familiar with ASP.
Third, FogBugz was a complex, mature application by the time Django or Rails were even considerations for production systems. Phasing in in parts is not really a viable solution either. There was a lot of business logic written and shared that those new parts would need access to, which would create more work to implement.
In short, no, you did not. You're looking at decisions made 10 years ago through today's lens, without considering the state of the art at the time.
(In case you're wondering, I worked at Fog Creek from 2005-2012, though I was never a part of the FogBugz team.)
As I mentioned PHP was pushing 10 years old at that point. They already had built a translator to it "Thistle", so they could have gone to PHP at that time, just like they mention going to C# now.
I'm not a huge PHP fan, but it would have saved 10 years of development and maintenance over their NIH solution. See the "Jumped the Shark" piece from Coding Horror... not a minority opinion.
Second, the "developer who started that" were the founders. One had worked at Microsoft, and so was very familiar with ASP.
Third, FogBugz was a complex, mature application by the time Django or Rails were even considerations for production systems. Phasing in in parts is not really a viable solution either. There was a lot of business logic written and shared that those new parts would need access to, which would create more work to implement.
In short, no, you did not. You're looking at decisions made 10 years ago through today's lens, without considering the state of the art at the time.
(In case you're wondering, I worked at Fog Creek from 2005-2012, though I was never a part of the FogBugz team.)