[jerf]

"I don't think that's such a problem, though. The "perfect" codebase should be the baseline to which you compare your current debt."

What I described isn't perfect; it's impossible. It destroys the utility of the idea of technical debt if that's the baseline, because it means that all choices are between "really bad" and "really bad".

"Aside, the first and last lines of your comment reminded of this post:"

Oh, certainly. But people do tend to assume that all comments that are not completely complimentary are intrinsically disagreement, and, well, let's be honest... statistically, it's true, so it's hard to be too annoyed that people's brains make that inference by default.