[jrx]

1. Yes, that happens, although constitutes around 10-15% of work being done.

2. I am certainly listening to any suggestions, but don't necessarily actively encourage it before proposing a solution. Perhaps this is a direction I need to move towards.

3. Mostly yes, as overwhelming part of the complexity just comes from knowing how various parts of the system interact. From time we have an open-ended 'research' (where the outcome is not known upfront) project, but these have a very mixed success rate and tend to overextend the time budget.

[yazaddaruvala]

You say it takes over a year for people to understand your whole system?

I'd recommend looking into why the ramp up time is so long.

Especially if you only assign tasks you know how to do, you are likely hampering your systems ability to become simpler.

For example, recently we took away 1000s of lines of nuanced code by using an out of the box cloud service (which none of us knew how to use). It offers a similar interface, and it's cheaper and easier to use. Took a week to play around and research if something else was more appropriate, took another three weeks, and we deleted 10% of our code.