[adrianmsmith]

Isn't there an analogy with software projects there? I regularly hear that some code needs to be replaced because it's "old" or "written by X, who is no longer here".

The underlying assumption seems to be that people in the past were stupid and incapable of writing the great code that we today are capable of writing.

I mean obviously old code can be written badly (just as modern code can be written badly). And sometimes there are newer techniques or libraries which weren't available at the time the original code was written. But more than a few times I've seen old code rewritten by modern code where the modern code is worse than the old code, and the justification is nothing more than the code was "old". Or the way desktop UIs change and evolve and throw away old paradigms - but the people who developed Windows 95 weren't fools just because they lived in the past. (e.g. all icons are monochromatic now whereas it was a design guideline in the past to use colours to aid memory of which icon was which.)