> Actually, the people who are "overly attached to code" tend to be computer scientists who are deeply interested in computation and its expression.

What academics are you rubbing shoulders with? Every single computer scientist I have ever met has projects where every increment in the major version goes like:

"I was really happy with my experimental kernel, but then I thought it might be nice to have hotpatching, so I abandoned the old codebase and started over from scratch."

The more novel and cutting edge the work you do is, the more harmful legacy code becomes.