I empathize with your story and have some of my own. The thing is, I've learned to trust my intuition even more, especially when it tells me something feels wrong (as yours was telling you). Now I even steer clear of projects if they feel off - I've developed a clearer sense of which projects will succeed and which will fail. Projects can fail for any number of factors, ranging from technical flaws, design flaws, overreaching in time or cost, and flaws in the organizational environment in which the project is to be created (not to be underestimated!).