There are times when I have witness (and participated in) arguments about trade-offs between scope and effort. Sometimes developers tend to push back fairly hard with the perception is that the effort is too high for a particular feature change.
Coders can become downright defensive when you are talking about changing the fundamentals of an application. After all, this is their baby and someone just through it out with the bathwater.
As programmers, we need to remember that software is soft. Meaning that it can be changed and it should be changed to conform to whatever the application requirements dictate. We are not talking about destroying a building to change the wall color. We are talking about changing software to meet new requirements.
By the way, we are paid to make these changes.