All this gate keeping is bullshit, but I do have to agree that we are really bad at actually engineering.

Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.

This is what’s happening in highly complex software over time. Every larger system has corners like this.

I’ve worked on a system that required that you send invalid XML, because some bloke 10 years ago didn’t know what he’s doing and hardcoded a certain structure.

Easy fix, but our clients relied in the old behavior, and nobody bothered fixing it.