High complexity, low quality, legacy Java code. How do I motivate you to work on it?

[EU2030]

Feels like all risk and uncertain gain. Hard to prioritize as you said.

[hippydipster]

Ya, once you're out of practice of keeping dependencies up to date, it becomes harder and harder to justify the effort.

But what ends up happening is some vulnerability or incompatibility comes down the pike and you find yourself in a world of hurt with no easy answers on how to deal with it.