There is often a third alternative: do not shoehorn it into something, nor rebuild what you have to fit this new thing, instead build the new thing on the side.
I sometimes have worked with engineers who believe they know what “the right way” is, or spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. And I have certainly worked on legacy systems persons like that have built. It’s not all fun and games.
The less we entangle things the easier it is to remove cruft when it is no longer needed.
You’re completely right about entanglement: Id go further to say that simplicity in its purest form is almost always more useful than clever upfront design, but it’s funny because clever upfront design process can be tweaked to bias simplicity.
What I’m trying to say is that there are two ways of designing systems: Make them flexible to meet unknown future objectives by incurring tech debt, or build them so simple that they are easy to change when those unknowns come in.
You may say that there’s no “right way” to build systems, but some ways are certainly better, perhaps it’s possible to distil a way from that, but i agree that it can be paralysis inducing. can’t go wrong with building Simple working systems, imo.
I sometimes have worked with engineers who believe they know what “the right way” is, or spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. And I have certainly worked on legacy systems persons like that have built. It’s not all fun and games.
The less we entangle things the easier it is to remove cruft when it is no longer needed.