That's because it was likely just a pile of quick fixes. At first, most accounting systems are nice and fast, but then one of the guys over in marketing needs t

That's because it was likely just a pile of quick fixes. At first, most accounting systems are nice and fast, but then one of the guys over in marketing needs this feature added, and one of the managers wants to be able to track his employees in it. Over time what may have been a relatively quick, agile system has ground to a halt because of all these "Features" tacked on. Does this mean the original style of programming was wrong? Does this mean that every time a new feature or bug was found the entire system should have been reengineered? No. That's what they hired you to fix. It took you a month to recreate the software, with all of the current features built into it. Since the only other real alternative is to keep a developer on hand all the time to re-write the software when needed, the "hack some features on" method seems to be far more cost effective.