It's not that they were total hacks. It's that they fell into the 1 standard deviation of the normal distribution that made them an average developer. Average devs produce the status quo, which is "software that works but that everyone complains about having to maintain". In my experience people with solid framework design and system architecture skillsets invariably fall into the top tail end of the distribution. They aren't like other developers. And they're rare. They can and often do get dubious pleasure out of making old code new again.