It’s viable, but when you’re buying a DAS for the drives, figure out what the USB chipset is and make sure it’s not a flaky piece of crap.
Things have gotten better, but some random manufacturers are still using trash bridge chips and you’ll be in for a bad time. (By which I mean your drives will vanish in the middle of a write, and corrupt themselves.)
It wasn’t mismanaged, at all.
It was flat-out stolen by Congress.
Or if you prefer to be all polite they took it, and wrote an IOU knowing full well there’s no way there’d ever be any money to pay them back without jacking taxes way up, and that’s never going to happen. (And even if it did, that’s you paying yourself back with new taxes on your old taxes.)
Functionally the same thing, really.