One reason I've seen these projects (take an existing system and make it work well) fail to gain traction is an unstated lack of faith in the people pushing for refactoring. In my experience this often comes from others having been burned by their prior proposed projects, where they've wasted 6 months doing self-indulgent refactoring that went nowhere or introduced bugs or made it hard for the rest of the team to contribute because of a bunch of new abstractions "to make the system flexible and generalized". The same people who care about code quality enough to argue for a cleanup project sometimes go overboard and burn their credibility. Unfortunately the right mix of judgment is hard to evaluate in any sense that isn't super-context-dependent.