I agree, a lot of unmaintained code is due to turnover of staff and few considering the software as an important output in its own right. But I don't think it w

I agree, a lot of unmaintained code is due to turnover of staff and few considering the software as an important output in its own right. But I don't think it would be that hard to find grad students/postdocs who would care about code, if that were something the field properly incentivized. Not only does software contribution not check the right boxes for career progression, it is also often looked down on. I find this especially laughable in biology... I've seen some (faculty) PhD committee members object to the student having a thesis chapter related to software contributions, because this is not "intellectual". But they are perfectly fine with one of the chapters being a wet lab paper where the student was a 3rd author who contributed purely through helping run experiments designed by the 1st author (e.g. handling mice, pipetting shit). There are PIs that simultaneously hold these two views, which to me signals a real misunderstanding of the challenges in and importance of writing decent software.