[jacquesm]

I've done a rewrite of a major website with another HN'er in about a month of close collaboration. Nobody even realized the platform had been changed before we told them. The original team was a large number of people working part time over a large number of years. Enough cruft had accumulated that a rewrite was the only way to deal with it.

Thanks to Charles Pick (phpnode on here) and pretty tight plan we got the job done in record time. Yes, we could have done even better. But we did not have the budget and the time so we worked within those constraints and got the job done. Would have been super to work with more people, more budget and several months to do it. But as it was it was already a huge improvement over what was there before.