Before the rewriting, how many SWE hours were devoted to the maintenance of this piece of code? Did the maintainer, if any, got meaningful recognition which correctly translate the importance of the work?
IIRC, we had a team of about six engineers working on the core system itself plus a few product teams building features on top. and yes, the team did get recognition for their work, which definitely helped when we decided to begin rewriting!
Were the six engineers taking part in the rewriting at all?
yep! it was 100% critical to have the experts on sync engine classic involved with nucleus. we shared the oncall rotation of maintaining the old system among the entire rewriting team.