[dasmoth]

Possibly, but if so I suspect it'll be a big change from the tooling we've got at the moment. And there's always a risk that tooling which makes some changes (rename a method...) trivial will make substantive changes seem even harder (because, comparatively, they are).

Somewhat the same arguments apply to approaches which put a lot of emphasis on small-scale/unit testing -- they offer reassurance when doing small-scale refactoring at the expense of making substantive refactoring harder.