[evincarofautumn]

I think there is something to be said for the technical & market advantage of “rewrites” in the sense of “very ambitious but still incremental refactorings”. Literally rewriting all the code from scratch is likely to be a mistake, but there’s a spectrum from “edit” through “refactoring” to “rewrite”, and it can pay to push toward the more aggressive end of that spectrum sometimes, if you know precisely what you’re doing.

That is, some of my projects (personal & professional) have benefited enormously from designating the old version as a “prototype”, creating a “new” project with slightly different architectural decisions based on the deficiencies of the old version, copying most of the code from the old version to the new, and filling in the details.