Even the best developers aren't miracle workers. Its clear that a lot of these older web projects like Flash and Java runtimes were poorly engineered from the s

Even the best developers aren't miracle workers. Its clear that a lot of these older web projects like Flash and Java runtimes were poorly engineered from the start, especially in terms of security, and now all the guys who maintain them just inherited thousands of man years of technical debt. They can't fix it, short or rewriting from scratch, and that has a time/money cost management isn't interested in. Worse, to fix a lot of these issues you'd have to fix the APIs as well, and that means a new version that doesn't work with the old codebase. People only use Java and Flash because they're on every computer and work with legacy apps. If you introduce a new breaking version, then you're asking for trouble.