I apologize for being overly defensive, but I've unfortunately lived through all of what I was saying. I do agree with your Janitor analogy in that at the end o

I apologize for being overly defensive, but I've unfortunately lived through all of what I was saying. I do agree with your Janitor analogy in that at the end of the day you're paid to do a job. However the problem often lies in situations where developers are hired for their expertise, but they aren't allowed to utilize it to do the job properly and instead are just asked to get it done. I guess if I hired engineers who were capable of doing a complete re-architecture of a system, but forced them to put in "ugly" code that is perfectly serviceable - I wouldn't expect them to be around very long. I don't speak for everyone, but I do strongly believe that those that do this for a job and paycheck will be fine, if not happy, working on ugly code to keep things going. Those that do this for the love it, whom in my opinion are often better programmers, won't. At least, not for very long. Still, there is definitely merit to your statements, especially when it comes to devs dreaming of re-architecture and instead having to settle for a small change. I appreciate the follow up.