Is that an improvement?

(I'd also argue that I've worked on systems where I've developed a better mental model of the problem than the first-gen people I inherited it from, because I as a maintainer was under less pressure to get anything that worked out the door initially.)

EDIT: and looking at the paper you linked there, https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf , I'm in complete agreement with "the designer's job is not to pass along "the design" but to pass along "the theories" driving the design" - it was always easier as that maintainer to take over a project where people could tell my why not just what.