[rented_mule]

> no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions

I think there's a frequent cause to this... It's difficult to know the requirements and constraints in place when that code or solution came to be. Many of us would have done something very similar, at least in spirit, under the same conditions. But those conditions constantly change and we tend to judge solutions based on current conditions. Try judging your own solutions by current conditions years after developing them and they sometimes won't look as good as you remember then being. When doing that, it's tempting to think "but x wasn't available and we didn't know y." With other people's solutions, we often lack the knowledge to be aware of those justifications. Investigating to find some of those justifications has helped me better figure out when replacing something is the right or wrong thing to do.