[adrianratnapala]

Yes it is good to understand people and the business, but you are also hinting that much of the bad code around the place is some kind of big-picture smart optimum of technical debt. vs. development velocity.

But this is unlikely if you stop to think about how humans behave. Who in an organisation has an incentive to find such an optimum? Shareholders and the board maybe; but they can only drive things by rewarding and punishing middle-level individuals. And they can only reward impact that they can see. Thus the incentives are to create visible impact which can be spun as a net gain. If that creates technical debt, then that is somebody else's problem.