I deeply get your point, but to step away from the metaphor, usually the problem of shitty code is a lack of focus on continual refinement instead of adding fea

I deeply get your point, but to step away from the metaphor, usually the problem of shitty code is a lack of focus on continual refinement instead of adding features, which is a management/process problem. If you have a serious problem with your process, you're never going to build a solid code base. Hell, at my last company, we have a big server product made of duct tape and spit, and about halfway through a total rebuild, we had another ball of spit and duct tape made of a slightly trendier stack. We added coders, we brought in front end guys, but guess who we didn't replace?