I agree. My conference sessions this year are all about making the right decisions and how we can do things correctly. One presentation is called "Software Gardening". It starts out by discussing that software development is not like construction, but more like gardening. Code needs to be nurtured, pruned, replanted, and sometimes composted. I've seen statistics that the average application is rewritten every four versions. And it's mainly because the care and nurturing of the code wasn't there.

>That's why I tend to favor rewrites over fixits if the app I'm supposed to fix is fundamentally flawed - or was just never really designed but was just cobbled together. When I did a lot of VFP rescue work, I ran into resistance until I demonstrated that with a framework in place and a revisiting of requirements it was often cheaper and definitely yielded a better result to just do it right.
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>Sometimes the old app - or code - isn't bad so much as the design is inappropriate and is something one will just have to keep fighting if you don't take a step back and fix it. A bad code module can be refactored, but a bad data design is forever <s>