And with every single modification, at least one person involved said, "this sucks, can we redesign it yet?", and was told, "no, we don't want to spend the mone

And with every single modification, at least one person involved said, "this sucks, can we redesign it yet?", and was told, "no, we don't want to spend the money on that right now." It's a catch-22 for developers in this position: you have to be able to justify every single major improvement from a position of cost-benefit to the business, but to do that adequately well enough to convince a client to spend the money requires up-front time and money expenditure that is hard to justify until after it's done.