right, so the crux of the issue is that to understand how much technical debt you have, you must understand what the market wants, and what features you need to

right, so the crux of the issue is that to understand how much technical debt you have, you must understand what the market wants, and what features you need to meet the demand. So I think it is extremely subjective. You could say "our product it perfect, it should never change". Thereby in itself you have accepted that all processes and information that create the product are also perfect, and therefore your technical debt is zero. You must pay nothing to achieve exactly where you want to be. You could think of technical debt as the energy lost due to friction. It is the energy lost changing from one point to another in your domain space. Perhaps "technical friction" would be a better concept for software. However, that is even more hand-wavvy and harder to measure ;-)