Your argument against Wasabi seems to boil down to the fact that it’s “beyond the pale,” “insane,” etc. These don’t sound like actual arguments to me; they’re just assertions.
FogBugz is a shrinkwrapped web app installed on customer’s own servers. It was originally written in VBScript way back when that wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Given our business constraints, spending two months writing a compiler that could preserve our code base, improve the language we used day-to-day, and continue to produce source code for our customers that runs on their platforms was the best business decision, even if it might make your head explode. Even if, as you claim, installing a PHP/.NET/Java Runtime at a customer site is everyone else’s business model, that doesn’t help us because our code is in VBScript and has been for many many years. We could port the VBScript to PHP/.NET/Java by hand, or we could spend two months writing a compiler. The latter decision took less work (a couple of months) and produced better working code that runs on all our customers’ machines without modification. I’m confident it was the best business decision, and I apologize if 50,000 programmers don’t understand it and their heads explode and 100,000 bloggers run around saying I’ve jumped the shark.