Comment by fifticon

I have my own theory on this. Green-field projects are usually whipped up and rolled out by the experienced devs in the shop. Once the boat is in the water and floating, the senior devs are posted off to next new-dev initiative, and the following maintenance/deployment work is assigned to less and less senior devs, and/or student programmers. Within 2-3 years, those inexperienced devs have mangled the original design into unrecognisability, and the application accumulates instabilities from their bolted-on "fixes". A different perspective is that the original creators are never allowed back to fix their design mistakes. I don't know if it's universal, but I have sure seen it in a lot of places, and I have myself been in most of those roles hinted at.