[namelosw]

I feel there are certain dynamics to the game. Back in the 90s rewrites are everywhere and they fail a lot because people were doing it so recklessly.

Nowadays, people are usually too afraid to even talk about it. As a result, many things that could be straightforwardly solved by rewrites were delayed to the point virtually impossible, causing eternal suffering and valuable features blocked forever.

[a-dub]

sometimes repair and retrofit is actually a bigger job than a ground up rebuild. depending on the state of things, this may not be discovered until time and political capital has already been committed to the first approach. i think the key is to avoid dogma and remain agile, not in the buzzword sense, but in the literal sense. be willing and able to scrap approaches and reverse course if things start looking worse than anticipated.