This has totally been my experience. Moving a method or variable up or down in the inheritance tree, extracting part of a method, inlining method calls: all of this is architectural refactoring. I've found the much of my refactoring time isn't spent in moving methods around and modifying signatures; it is spent in modifying the algorithms and data organization. Not organization in the sense of whether variable belongs in sub- or super-class, but in the sense of whether some subset of data should belong in a particular class, or some new delegate class I construct. That new delegate class might not be a subset of the class I'm splitting apart, so requires more than just some automated extraction process. I can't help but create a mental picture of all of this as a sort of architectural autopilot -- it can handle making minor course and altitude corrections, but still expects you to have thought about things before pressing the 'engage' button.