[perlgeek]

> Do you think that sort of a problem (incremental changes eroding an initially sound structure) could be fixed with better refactoring tools?

Only if those refactoring tools could refactor the domain itself (and the environment), not just the code :-)

Often these special cases aren't intrinsic to the code, but caused by inconsistent business rules, or weird issues with the environment (some browsers not sending some events, workarounds for compiler bugs on ancient platforms that must still be supported, socket closing might or might not cause a flush depending on whether you're on Windows or *nix, ...)