All we know applications, which are well design implemented on the right way but need continuous caring; and yes, we met those ones, the "temporary" solutions, which are surviving everything with no caring and no way to be killed. What could be the reason?
I refered Roger Sessions in another article: "The law of entropy tells us that the battle for simplicity is never over." I believe by heart of the validity of this sentence but I know well that it is confusing by the reality of temporary solutions. What can be the reason of their success? What we do better implementing a temporary solution than for normal applications? Is a simply (un)fortune? These are the questions what makes architects crazy.
Some weeks ago I met the theorem of Dissipation-Driven Adaptation (DDA), which on first sence seems to be something going opposing to the law of entropy. Jeremy England, who made this hypothesis says that it rather extends the law of entropy and does not confute. My crazy idea was reading the articles about the DDA, that something similar would happen with the temporary applications too. Why? The reason is that the temporary application seems to break all the rules while they are surviving "ages" in the universe of frequent changes on the same way as the energy focused as DDA identified.
Jeremy speaks about a driving force of the environment which causes the interesting result, like energy in case of the example of turbulent fluid. If we would confirm the idea in the field of architecture management we first should find the "energy-equivalent" force for the architecture. Till know the values we can measure are the cost of changes or operation, the time needed to change and the number of components installed/implemented. None of those are usable to single dimension about the behaviour of the architecture as all of them are complex and has many other aspects driving them.
On the other hand the reason may be not that far to seek. Temporary solutions are each time compromises. They are not perfect from the principles prospective of the company. In lucky cases the compromises mean that the uncomfortable rules were avoided. If you see many temporaries surviving, with the same "exceptions" then you have to simply change your rules, retiring the ones, which made temporaries successful if they did nothing with the given case.
More philosophic reason can be the imperfectness. Human brain does not like things which are too simple and too perfect. Perfectness is boring. Things should have some extra essence what addresses the subconscious.