[eloisant]

It hasn't always been true, it started with rapid development tools in the late 90's I believe.

And some people thought they were building "disposable" code, only to see their hacks being used for decades. I'm thinking about VB but also behemoth Excel files.

[ahepp]

I guess the question is, are the issues not worth fixing because implementing a fix is extremely expensive, or because the improvements from fixing it were anticipated to be minor? I assume the answer is generally a mix of the two.