Maybe the issue is in use of the word "maintenance"? Sure, it's fixing things that break as things are used, but it's not like it's replacing something that ge

Maybe the issue is in use of the word "maintenance"? Sure, it's fixing things that break as things are used, but it's not like it's replacing something that gets worn out with exactly the same thing, or cleaning, or IDK enough about what actually goes on for physical plant maintenance. Things like that do exist - log rotation, restarting processes / servers because of memory leaks that aren't worth tracking down - but, mostly, seems like software "maintenance" is more like post-release iteration cycles. Some of these are about the pure tech ("here's a consequence to this design when under use that was not anticipated / handled"), others are product design ("turns out it needed to do something a little bit differently") or additional features necessary to make something useful, or just additional features to make it more useful. Or, you know, it was just built wrong the first time. Seems like all of those situations are actually just more of the same iteration cycles as during development, we just call them "maintenance" for some reason. (well, except that maybe they needed information and observation that are only available once it's under use...)