[jspiral]

The facts of this case seem to tilt things in favor of a rewrite more than other other examples I've seen. - reasonable confidence that large portions of the current codebase are truly dead - lack of tests in the existing codebase - a fair amount of real world experience showing higher productivity in rails over java web stacks - a problem domain that the decision makers can actually wrap their heads around (vs a legacy system that manages commercial mortgage repackaging or something where there is no one person who actually understands everything important that the system does) - a new development team who's going to have learning curve anyway

this seems like about the perfect situation for starting over. congrats!