&gt;&gt; Once a program has been in production for a while and its use cases are more well defined it becomes easier for a single person to swoop in and rewrite it in a far more conscice way.
&gt;I think it&#x27;s always easier for the guy&#x2F;gal who wrote something to clean it up than for the next guy&#x2F;gal, who doesn&#x27;t know the code or its history as well.<p>Once a piece of functionality gets established in production, over time the knowledge of the original requirements and the implementation is lost.  The consequence is that nobody knows why the code does what it does (and usually it does something important) and due to it working fine in production there is strong pushback to making changes.