Sounds about right, but: > As people move off of the team, features are forgotten and misunderstood; but as long as those features continue to work, there will

Sounds about right, but: > As people move off of the team, features are forgotten and misunderstood; but as long as those features continue to work, there will be customers continuing to depend on them. You have this in the non-rewrite scenario, too, it's just part of the technical debt, so it's less obvious to see. And it will bite you just as hard if you need to update the feature. So because rewrites are good at uncovering unknown unknowns, and it might be better to say that the technical debt was underestimated.