Yeah, I'm not saying that a rewrite is necessarily a bad idea or that it wouldn't improve things (though writing a drop-in replacement for something like glibc

Yeah, I'm not saying that a rewrite is necessarily a bad idea or that it wouldn't improve things (though writing a drop-in replacement for something like glibc in Rust sounds pretty challenging to me). The situation I'm talking about is the one where no one has an incentive to improve the software day-to-day. If we really want to fix the problem, we should also look at how it got that way.