so I need to maintain this old legacy project, where one part of it is amaturely written with Wordpess, lots of crappy custom plugins, lots of ducktaped scripts, that solve one or other problem, database is designed very very purely too, there is also other part written with Zend, which is thightly connected with WP part, there is also this other "masterpiece" project connected to first project data. Main table contains around 1.5M records and needs to be normalized too. now this big ball of nails "works", also it has lots of LOCs, which are result of bad foundations, so it is a huge pain to maintain. Thing is, the way I see this, by not rewriting we are loosing on the long term, because we lose flexibility both from technology and busi ness perspective,plus it starts not to scale, but rewriting is a risk, plus we would need to convert old data to new data structures. Hacker part of me wants to break this, take a risk and do it right, but at the same time I am having a feeling that my immaturity tries to take a too big bite at once. So what do you think?
In situations like yours, 9 out of 10 times, I suggest to rewrite. Rationally, the situation a) won't get better, and b) will certainly get worse. You should bite the bullet before it's too late.
And by too late I mean something breaks completely and not only will you have to rewrite the whole thing, but your service will also be offline (ergo you may be also losing users/customers).