At this point I just don't think total rewrites from scratch are a good idea, full stop. I've never seen a rewrite from scratch that didn't lose most of the learned solutions from the previous attempt, repeat most of the same mistakes and have to re-discover the solutions, and utterly fail to even attempt a passable improvement on a model of the core complexity of the problem being solved.

I'm not granting a "rewrite from scratch in Rust" exception even though that's in vogue right now. I'm not saying don't rewrite it in Rust, I'm saying don't rewrite it from scratch. It's harder to write new features in Rust while maintaining the old C code, but it's the right way to do it.