I inherited a code base that other people thought they understood. People have very different tolerance levels for complexity and lack of control. People here c

I inherited a code base that other people thought they understood. People have very different tolerance levels for complexity and lack of control. People here complain about bad coders but the incentives out there are all aligned against quality: short stints and glorified short-term-thinking (a.k.a. Agile) and proprietary code. Imagine if you were bound to work on a codebase for most of your career, were given all the time you need to do your best and had all your code in the open, forever part of your reputation. Would you write better code?