A backdoor in xz

It's tricky, though, because one of the ways to get more quality is to realize that some of the foundations are shaky and built on a bunch of poorly-thought-out principles. But if you rebuild them, that is a form of speeding up, since it requires changes by everyone else to move to the new thing.

I use a variety of software on a daily basis that, so far as I can tell, has worked correctly for years. In some cases I've been tempted to adopt it and maintain it as part of that effort in slowing down and improving quality. But probably 95% of the time when I look at the source to some old program that I have come to rely on, it's written in janky C with global variables all over the place, static buffers, no comments, and a code flow that I find difficult to follow. I have rescued some of my own software from such a state through the power of sheer embarrassment, but I've yet to have the oomph to rescue someone else's software.

We have an enormous maintenance problem, and I'm not sure what slowing down and writing less code with more quality looks like in the face of that maintenance problem. It's one of the reasons why I'm somewhat sympathetic to the folks who would prefer to rewrite the world. It looks like speeding up and writing more code, the opposite of what you're correctly advocating, but the advantage of a clean slate is that it's a lot easier to add standards for slower work and higher quality when starting from scratch than it is to retrofit them to an existing community, or even an orphaned code base.

(And this is all apart from the fact that slower and higher quality is more expensive, and we lack any effective mechanism to fund resilience, sustainability, and going slower. Not just in software, but in most human endeavor. Most social and political forces are pushing in exactly the opposite direction, as you correctly note.)