Wow, I must say I am still learning the ways of software development but your post is interesting and enlightening in so many ways. Very interesting to try and understand all the ramifications of changing even the smallest and seemingly insignificant piece of code in an already developed project. I suppose to most sobering fact is that there are probably many cases where you just have to put up with bad code purely due to the fact that it is just not cost effective to go and correct the mistake/s.