There are times, when a complete rewrite is warranted; prose, code or otherwise. Yet explicitly putting a due date on knowledge and its pursuits ignores the fact that novel insights may arive- and last well beyond the 'end date' we put on such endeavours.
Firth's, "you shall know a word by the company it keeps" from 1957 and whether meaning resides 'in the text' or in the minds of the reader, prevailed academia at the time, and seemed fairly settled (halfway in between, contextually entangled)[0].
Yet this very premise became the basis of modern NLP half a century later, where yes, a semblance of meaning could be found in just the text itself; you just needed a lot of it to be able to make out the interrelations.
That is to say: 'settled knowledge' today [ed. if there is such a thing] can have a renewed impact tomorrow, and it seems odd to self impose an expiry date on its pursuit because at this moment in time, there seems nothing left to uncover.