I've been hearing these sorts of complaints since I started working. Bob leaves, immediately people need to rewrite Bob's code because it sucks. The truth is often that the other person doesn't fully understand it. Writing code is easy, reading code is hard.

There is almost always a way to work around something. "Architecturally sound" is in the eyes of the beholder, and unless you're building the next Google, a sub-optimal solution may be perfectly fine. That's what we're paid the big bucks for: to develop a solution, one that works "good enough", without having to constantly rewrite... sorry, "refactor"... the entire project.

This isn't always the case though. Sometimes the code really does suck!