My opinion is that each line of code should be easily understandable. Without that, code is very hard to work with. You're right that other code problems can b

My opinion is that each line of code should be easily understandable. Without that, code is very hard to work with. You're right that other code problems can be worse. But that's no excuse to avoid doing the basics. To clean up system design issues, you must first know what a better system design would be. It's not enough to realize that what you have is bad. I do this a lot, and part of my approach is to always be incremental. Improve one detail/aspect at a time. The worst, very tempting, idea in this field is to throw everything away and start over... > I also struggle to balance it with getting feature work done FWIW, I like to spend 1/3 of my time cleaning up and refactoring.