Let me be devil's advocate: 1. I could do that in a weekend This is a figure of speech. It's not literally true, it just serves to reinforce a point. It means

Let me be devil's advocate: 1. I could do that in a weekend This is a figure of speech. It's not literally true, it just serves to reinforce a point. It means that they can do X in a relatively short period of time. 2. It's completely modular It's perfectly possible to write modular code. It's also perfectly possible to take non-modular code and make it modular. I've done both. 3. With the product debugged, we need to go back into the code and speed it up. Performance issues are bugs just like anything else. They must be triaged. If it's major, then you can't just leave it in. If it's minor, then maybe you can. Whether the fix could cause more bugs is irrelevant: there's always this risk when changing any code (no matter how large or small the fix). 7. It is the server or bandwidth It's not unusual for resources or bandwidth to be an issue. You can't always blame it on the code.