Our applications tend to mould their functional design to cater to technological limitations of the platform at a point of time of the project's implementation. These additional designs, I would rather call crumbs, over time are felt to be integral part of the design. It doesn't hurt us initially.
Fast forward, 20 years, when we are at a point of migration of these applications to new high end architecture, with cutting edge steel and chips, supporting these migrations. We feel the pain of not having expertise or courage to weed out crumbs from the initial design requirements. Blame this to either missing initial expertise - all gone or retired, or lack of capability to digest and map new technological offerings from bay area companies to these age old "functionality" .. or crumbs, and continue to live with them.
Just shows cost of incomplete or non-existent enterprise planning documents - targeting building blocks of the enterprise - process and information. I wouldn't risk delving into the other units, people & motivation. Operation models variation over time is another story...
