In the same way that it can be difficult to justify spending a week to reduce technical debt within a fast-moving engineering team, I think there's a parallel challenge for industry to make the work of maintenance be seen -- and be rewarded -- equally alongside feature development.

Perhaps we already have (or at least nearly have) enough code, systems and services to achieve the tasks that 97.5% of us need, but they're all broken and non-interoperable in frustrating ways.

Can we spend a while honing and refining those before building incompatible replacements? Or, failing that, at least identify the core issues before repeating the same mistakes?