I've made a career out of bashing half-baked code into shape, or dragging legacy code to meet new needs. You have tests? You can be much more confident about where you're going. Usually the first thing I do when dealing with code is write some tests to capture how it behaves now, before making any changes.
That sounds familiar :) Keep in mind the existing tests are typically half-baked too, so there's lots of additional testing going on no matter what.
Sometimes I just reflect on YEARS mucking with code written from someone that was just learning, and I wonder if I'm a little too in the "sunk cost investment" mindset. Hard to tell I suppose, but certainly worth thinking about.
