>and the quality of the overall codebase tends to trend to the lowest common denominator of ability. I think you've hit the key issue here. You can't build a s

>and the quality of the overall codebase tends to trend to the lowest common denominator of ability. I think you've hit the key issue here. You can't build a super high quality codebase if you have a wide range of abilities in your dev team. If you personally try to maintain the quality bar really high across the whole codebase, you'll just exhaust yourself. Ultimately that's on the company, not you. If they want a really high quality codebase, they can pay double market rate and hire devs very slowly and carefully. I'm going to take a wild guess that they're not doing that. So don't feel like it's on you to be the saviour of the codebase. Do what you can, within reason.