Uh, what you describe is rewriting, not refactoring... Refactoring is often a great investment, and is not done 'from scratch'.
I would question your assertion that modern states have 1,000+ solved problems. They have no unit testing, shoddy QA if any, etc. It's a bad analogy, imho. When they do generate a 'tweak' it is often not solving a problem, but generating more problems than it solves.
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Uh, what you describe is rewriting, not refactoring... Refactoring is often a great investment, and is not done 'from scratch'.
I would question your assertion that modern states have 1,000+ solved problems. They have no unit testing, shoddy QA if any, etc. It's a bad analogy, imho. When they do generate a 'tweak' it is often not solving a problem, but generating more problems than it solves.