I completely disagree. certainly the chances that a rewrite in a standard software organization are pretty good that the new version will be just as broken, but

I completely disagree. certainly the chances that a rewrite in a standard software organization are pretty good that the new version will be just as broken, but in a new and different way than the last. but I've taken several projects in the 100s of k-lines and translated them into projects with equivalent functionality and spanning between 1-2 decimal orders of magnitude less source code. that's not an argument for rewriting in all circumstances - I just think at least half of most mature software is just 'junk dna' - useless boilerplate, unused paths, poor abstractions, etc