Literally no engineers were allocated to the issue and majority of the project.
20% of the time I work on novel unforseeable issues. R&D and future tech stuff.
80% of the time its culture, professionalism, and generally "are you fucking serious" issues.
I've dealt with literally every situation you've described however. Just because this particular reason was that there were no engineers, you could swap in any other situation and still have a true story.
'It's funny how small scale engineering problems are rooted in code and large scale engineering problems are rooted in people.'