It's an endless cycle, honestly. We have shipping deadlines we can't miss, so we write some code we're not proud of. Then we do our best to live with it until

It's an endless cycle, honestly. We have shipping deadlines we can't miss, so we write some code we're not proud of. Then we do our best to live with it until it's hard to continue. This triggers a refactor that snowballs. Then that causes us to be behind for our new deadline, so we put in some code that we're not proud of.... All in all, I would say that the quality of the code depends on how close we are at the moment to shipping.