[maratd]

> I don't know anything about you, but judging from that attitude you haven't worked in many teams.

I haven't worked on any teams. I've always written software solo. What of it?

> You may have the luxury of refactoring all over the place, but the reality out there is that horrible code like this is left to fester until it causes real business damage.

Refactoring is not a luxury, but a necessity. Not only do I refactor other peoples' code, but I refactor my own. That's the only way to get to a quality code base.

[aGHz]

> I haven't worked on any teams. I've always written software solo. What of it?

Well, that means you have zero experience with the majority of concerns expressed in this thread, and so are not qualified to opine on them. You work in a happy bubble and I envy you for it, but in the real world you very very rarely get the go-ahead to refactor old code. So in the real world, you very very rarely get to see a quality code base. In any language, really, but PHP compounds this problem with its idiosyncrasies. But you wouldn't know about that.

[jurre]

Isn't the fact that you have to refactor so much of other peoples code an indication that something might be wrong? I'm not familiar with the PHP ecosystem but I don't know of many people having to refactor Ruby gems.