&quot;I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s such a problem, though. The &quot;perfect&quot; codebase should be the baseline to which you compare your current debt.&quot;<p>What I described isn&#x27;t perfect; it&#x27;s impossible. It destroys the utility of the idea of technical debt if that&#x27;s the baseline, because it means that all choices are between &quot;really bad&quot; and &quot;really bad&quot;.<p>&quot;Aside, the first and last lines of your comment reminded of this post:&quot;<p>Oh, certainly. But people do tend to assume that all comments that are not completely complimentary are intrinsically disagreement, and, well, let&#x27;s be honest... statistically, it&#x27;s true, so it&#x27;s hard to be too annoyed that people&#x27;s brains make that inference by default.