I think thats an important point. As someone on the back end of a career in software I look back at all the projects I was proud of and thought I crafted well, and in the end they turned out just like all the other large unmaintainable swamps that everyone complains about.
Not completely clear about this, but the industry seems structured in such a way that (most) everything ends up being a horrifying mess of hacks over time. For any codebase, you can see it fall over the cliff. Poorly chosen compromises are made. People lose track of whats going on. A simple joy with boundless possibilities turns into a pointless daily slog. A rewrite would be too expensive and risky. An incremental refactoring too unjustifiable. The passionate people leave, and the interns are left running the asylum, hating every minute.
I don't know what the answer is, but no one seems to want greenfield development anymore, probably for good reason. The prospect of picking up someone else rotten excreta is pretty unappealing.
So yes, I think its salient to point out that that terrible bloated CMS you're stuck trying to mush into shape was once someones bright and shining future.
