This is an excellent post; thank you. You've brought up some useful points as to why the 'civil union' approach may not be as robust as one might expect, or hope.

(I do think that the 'shotgun debugging' analogy, while amusing, is not really quite on: 'nuke everything and start over' is much more like attempting to replace the flawed code entirely. But I don't insist on having a discussion about exactly which programming practices are most relevant here. :) )