There are a lot of "Maybe"s in your second paragraph. I'd say, yes, there are a lot of lessons buried in old code, but often, there is an equal amount of bagga

There are a lot of "Maybe"s in your second paragraph. I'd say, yes, there are a lot of lessons buried in old code, but often, there is an equal amount of baggage we are too fearful to abandon because of backward compatibility and "bug became feature"-situations. And even then, it's not you who is abandoning that, which makes the attitude even more baffling to me.