>Even if they don't take the engine a different direction the up-leveling cost of getting new features/bug fixes is significant. Back when I was working in industry we had one person who's almost fulltime job was to merge -> fix compile errors -> fix runtime issues -> checkin change and uncover more edge cases that got broken -> repeat process, it was brutal.

And here I thought industry is that one programming market with no awful grinds. I do sympathize though, webdev frontend+backend is just hellish (but you do have some tools to alleviate the pain, but when you have to rewrite the app 6+ times it really breaks you).