[idolaspecus]

I agree that maintaining comments is difficult and that they tend to drift. A good way to mitigate this problem is to explicitly include checking comments as part of the code review process.

I'm not saying you did this, but I think that most people who point out little issues with the mundane processes within software development haven't yet grokked the dev process in its totality. Commit messages, code reviews, comments, documentation, unit tests, design patterns and idioms, all these practices' strengths and use-cases compensate the others' weaknesses. I.e. to basically any gripe (again, not saying you griped) like "process X isn't worth it because of some maintenance issue" there's an answer along the lines of "well that's what process Y is for". Together all these processes produce high-quality codebases but when you lack one or more of them the whole thing falls apart quickly.