On another note I wonder how much the LCAF procurement branch was hitting itself when they figured out that the crossbows and probably the marsdens II tooling was very likely in storage and could have been spun up a long long time ago
I mean, it would have required a lot of work to turn the Crossbow into something usable. The company explicitly stopped making them rather than modernize the line. Likely cause being that MacEnroe Motors just didn't have the knowhow to get the job done, otherwise why stop making the Mech on the line you've just bought?
So the line is still configured for making Primitive Crossbows rather than a T1 Mech with an SFE and Standard armor. For the early Succession wars, where a lot of knowledge was explicitly lost, that would be a hell of an ask even if someone had remembered that the tooling existed.
Now, they've got half the work already done for them. With the Catachan core, they've got the blueprints and all the development data for the upteched Crossbow, meaning that all they have to do is refurbish the line to produce it. And this is late 3SW. A lot of technology is in the process of recovering. It's still not gonna be an easy process, but it's definitely much more manageable.