I love legacy software so much - all the trouble and care I put into making sure it continues to work while I fix and improve it, is like operating on a live pa

I love legacy software so much - all the trouble and care I put into making sure it continues to work while I fix and improve it, is like operating on a live patient. I see no point in judging; I like to dig and to understand the particular choices. Seeing how much trouble companies have with legacy code, I tried to market myself as a consultant around those kinds of problem: say, adapting a legacy system for a more reliable and pleasant development process, or things like this. Unfortunately I found that it’s a hard work institutionally. Even where I found gratitude and respect of my people whose quality of life working with the software in question improved, I still was plagued by the problems of blame-assignment and career-making but futile huge rewrites orchestrated by people for whom destroying my work and denying its value was highly beneficial. I don’t know, I burnt out on this last time so hard I’ve been taking kind of a vacation. As much as I love sustainable software development, it’s a losing battle and probably a futile goal in most of the industry. I’m just trying to accept this and move on.