[mobjack]

There comes a point where impossible to leave code in a better state without a major refactor.

The choice is between writing a few ugly if statements making the code a little worse or spending 10x the time refactoring hoping you don't introduce any regressions.

[Silhouette]

The choice is between writing a few ugly if statements making the code a little worse or spending 10x the time refactoring hoping you don't introduce any regressions.

Those few ugly if statements might make the code only a little worse and take 1/10 of the time to do the job properly if the code was previously good. However the trouble with technical debt is the interest can compound rapidly. Your random set of if statements combined with three other developers' random sets of if statements from previous hacky changes (two of them in other parts of the code that the part you're modifying now implicitly and surprisingly depends on as a result) could be a story with a very different ending.