this isn't always true. more than once I've taken a large codebase, whacked it down to 10% of its original size, without losing any features and gaining quite a

this isn't always true. more than once I've taken a large codebase, whacked it down to 10% of its original size, without losing any features and gaining quite a bit of performance. smallest-change maintenance by lots of people just introduces cruft by its nature. not suggesting that doing that rewrite is usually a good idea...but I disagree that all that stuff always represents anything fundamental