Keep It Simple, Stupid

You wouldn't control the water temperature in your entire house from a single location. Why would you write your code that way?

Weeks of coding can save hours of planning.

Normalize your database tables to avoid technical debt.

Leaving old fields in place is even worse than leaving old code. Instead of runtime errors, you'll end up with harder-to-detect data errors.

What's the harm in leaving old code in place? It's not like it costs us anything. ... Or does it?