My experience is there's a tendency to ship the first viable thing that comes out and deal with the rest on an as-needed basis. This is fine for stuff that can survive being a bit ramshackle at first if you can refactor it later, but some things are highly resistant to later refactoring.
Shipping quickly is often a strategy used to discover the problem space. Some things should be done as quickly as possible and some things should not. The developers/tech management are responsible for forseeing such cases.
Hopefully the initial developers are good ones. If not, I'm sorry and I hope they pay you well. I've been there :-|
