Irritating retrograde

A government agency I interact with has updated their web-based client software. The original application was a basic sequence of web forms. Its replacement? An approximately ~50MiB Silverlight-based application. In the process of the update, they discarded my original web account and password. The backend service that the application must communicate with is still slow, operating costs now include the bandwidth to update cached copies (for performance reasons), and the application itself has new usability issues. Because of the switch from standardized Web technologies to Silverlight, the majority of their customers can’t run the application on their phone or tablet. (If it were Flash, iPads would still be excluded.) How was this change an upgrade, again?