I’m not saying you can fire everyone, but the maintenance team doesn’t need to be the size of the development team if the goal is to only maintain features.

Most extension today is enshitification. We’ve also seen major platforms scale to the size of Earth.

If you’re only going to maintain and don’t have a plan on adding features outside of duct taping AI to the software, what use is it maintaining a dev team at the size you needed it to be when creating new code?

I don’t know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don’t need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.

they have several episodes on why you can’t shouldn’t do that

Fixed that for you.

There is a minor arc with Bashir in the later half of DS9 where it comes out that he’s been genetically altered as a child to become smarter. It gets a lot into the ethics of changing someone who couldn’t consent to being altered and also deals with others who didn’t have as successful of a modification.