I don't understand what is so "different" or "obsolete" about these formats that a perl script can't translate.
Reminds me of a funny story...
One day the company where I work hired on a quirky but very intelligent dude I knew in highschool. I hadn't kept in contact with him, but I was aware that he had completed a degree in computer science, and gone on to complete a masters in the same.
So he's sitting in a meeting, the topic being how their team was going to load some data files in from some archaic format. The crew is going on and on about the enterprise level ETL tool they use, and how difficult it'll be to get the map wired up for this format. Dude pipes up, "You guys know we could just knock this out in perl in a couple hours, right?"
Whole room looks at him like he has two heads. Now, mind you, I have a pretty good understanding of the problem space -- in my opinion the suggestion was, eh, maybe a bit naive from a maintenance perspective, but would have actually worked just fine. And probably would have been faster, both to write and execute. It wasn't that difficult of a job, honestly.
The reaction was more of a
that's not the way we do things here then one based in technical merit. It was an interesting case study into the group-think and associated politics in a corporate environment.