I've been programming since 1981 where I started programming on IBM mainframes in COBOL. For some shops, it was a big deal for others it was not. Alot of the older legacy code in COBOL was really crap spaghetti code and it took alot of work and planning to identify it all and fix it. When you have 30,000 lines of spaghetti code (just one example program) that was mangle over many years by many mediocre programmers, it can be a nightmare untangling it.
At the time of Y2K I was manager of development for a small software developer and also send out compliance letters. Fortunately, the product that I was working on then had to do with mortgages so there had been some foresight in using a four digit year which is the real fix. What you did will work, but isn't the best solution and doesn't work for all applications where historical data prior to 1988 might be valid.
I will agree the crisis was overblown by some, but my point stands. There would have been alot of fairly large problems, particularly in the financial world without having addressed the problem ahead of time.
[added] p.s. There was a lot of demand for COBOL programmers in the years just prior to Y2K and so much so I could have made a fabulous salary during that period working on those projects if I hadn't been happy where I was.
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