[silentmars]

Joel's article is cautioning against the kind of cost/benefit-blind thinking that makes "rewrite all the code" a default option. Actually, I think in a certain way your story - perhaps unintentionally - agrees with this point.

In your case, you accepted the cost of doing the project over, which as you said was to write it again taking the same amount of time. The fallacy that Joel is talking about is engineers thinking that they can do a total rewrite of some software that took years to build in some much shorter period of time with better code. The predictable result is huge financial losses, and sometimes even a total market abdication.