This is like taking your MySQL app and running it against MongoDB with a bunch of hacks to translate the SQL into mongo calls.
And then claiming you did all this so you could "avoid a rewrite".
Some architectural decisions are far reaching and leaky. This is not the ideal but it often is the ideal trade off. The alternative is decoupling to the nth degree resulting in a hunk of junk impossible to change that won't get off the ground.
Changing the position of the engines means it's no longer the same 'tried and tested airframe'.
However the analogy to "rewrite all this" politics is good I think. Often you could walk into a building and say "all this needs to go" but truely the costs of doing so and starting from scratch are hidden in code and engineering design that's survived a trial period.
No matter how nice and neat everything might look, that's only because it doesn't yet account for 10,000 other edge cases you're not able to simultaneously consider...a system as complex as a commercial plane is still going to care about these.