So maybe Fog Creek was correct to take whichever path cost the fewest resources. If it took fewer hours to write and maintain a small transpiler than to re-write the entire application, then that would help profit margins on a product that is not taking over the world anyway.

Yes, this doesn't look like winning: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=fogbugz%2C%20atlassi...

You have a valid point. But just as an aside, you know who makes Trello, right?

Yes, that would be Trello, Inc

https://trello.com/about

The fact that FC managed to come up with a successful (but not necessarily profitable) product idea and spin it off into its own company doesn't really say much about the validity of their decisions on a completely different product.

Nor is it evidence of Fog Creek "winning the game" (whatever that might mean)

Yeah - Trello Inc. :)

Was Trello written in Wasabi, though?

Is there anything else like Kiln Harmony on the market? The ability for our developers to use Git or Hg (with a couple of caveats...) on any of our repositories is a great recruiting point.

i really dont think anyone would base their choice on whether they used hg or git (or both, or either for that matter). It's a very small, and rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things.