>> So i just want to tell you that i've done successful rewrites! [...] It took a couple of years, the rewrite team was 2-5 times the size of the team that built the old site
So what makes this rewrite successfull? I am sure in that time you could have easily added the I18N, tests and deployment and refactored the most difficult parts of the code so that it would be more expandable and easier to maintain.