And is based on a framework that's no longer maintained outside the site because it had been superseded be newer and better ones.

I remember things a little differently. Everything's origins are in 1998 or so, when writing something this big and interactive and featureful was new (especially for the people doing it). In particular, the object-relational impedence in Everything is awful and the source of a lot of problems. It's also not well factored.

I've pondered a lot about how to write a similar system--because there are a lot of good ideas implemented imperfectly--and the basic ideas are solid. If I were to rewrite Everything today, I'd use Moose and KiokuDB and a fat model, naked object pattern. The only piece I haven't mapped out in my head is the URL routing scheme.

Everything stagnated after the parent company disappeared; it had never attracted much of a community, PM used a fork of the code, and there was no clear path for upgrades. Any one of those is a danger sign. All three together is much worse.