Right, but I'm thinking from the perspective of someone who's been working on something for ages, gone through the stress of nearly losing it, then miraculously recovering it ... only to have found that a lot of their work was ditched. You're right that it probably ended up better, and sister comments are right in that it wasn't ALL for naught ... but can you imagine the moment you found out it was being reworked?

No need to imagine. It's not just during disasters like the Pixar case. Creative collaborative ventures like films and animation are filled with months of effort being deleted with a few quick keystrokes.

Back when I was still in the film/video industry, it happened often, you kinda get accustomed to the ephemeral nature and you try not to get too attached to your work. Not always successfully but you try.

> But the best architectures I've seen have been demolished, destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up for their purpose.

This can also be a destructive siren call:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

But I think it's not absolute. Sometimes rewrites are imperative.

In the case of toy story 2, I think the analogy would be that they ditched the product they were working on to create a different one. Thus making joel's point non relevant there

It wasn't a new product, they kept a lot of the assets (notably the characters and the universe) but rewrote the script extensively and had to scrap a lot of animation.

I don't think an analogy to software rewrite works very well, the domains are so different. For example Joel makes the point that code have a lot of embedded information which you have to rediscover if you rewrite from scratch. This introduces a huge risk and uncertainty.

If you rewrite a movie script halfway during production you have to scrap a lot of work but you don't really loose knowledge, so the risk is more manageable.

And I'm also pretty sure they reworked their backup and validation tools as well.

Same with government.

Indeed, about every couple century in history we come up with some new form of government. It's only ever so incremental (hence why 'revolutions' are few and major in scope), and often has to do with adapting to new conditions (technological and social change mostly).