Being a hold over employee through 4 rewrites I'd say that can be one factor. Another is that the business landscape changes too. So all these factors combined make it difficult to say for certain which of them had an objective impact.

Instead of blaming the developers every time a feature is missing, consider who is setting the priorities for development. In places where developers are being paid for their work, this is rarely done by the developers themselves. Always interesting to see how much end users specifically blame developers for whatever's going on, I guess without understanding that there are usually all kinds of managers who may not understand software or the users or both but just want to sit on developers to crank features out as quickly as possible.

> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?