That's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that dismissing any calls for any change (whether it's whole rebuild or any degree of aggressive change) is

That's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that dismissing any calls for any change (whether it's whole rebuild or any degree of aggressive change) is often justified with "but we've already paid $x for this project". Couple that with then also complaining about further costs just grinds my gears. Probably 1/3rd of the projects I've worked on over the last 20 years were software systems that were objectively/measurable poor, and probably half of those warranted a rebuild, and genuinely not 'flavor of the month' justifications. You can't cheaply and safely, for example, run a business on foxpro/db2, relying on one person in a different country with all the source code, running in a virtualized windows XP environment on Windows server 2000, while also wanting to modify your business processes and grow your business. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the costs and risks outweight whatever benefit you've already bought and paid for the last 20 years.