How are you motivated to rewrite a program from the ground up?

I have to do this now, and I would rather work on other things.

If I have to choose between rewriting an existing program, or modifying it heavily, I would choose to rewrite 90% of the time. It's always good to "own" the code base, and it's difficult to do if it's already written by someone else, especially if it's big and old.

Will rewriting allow you to remove poor design and fix production issues thereby freeing your time later?

If yes, this should be priority #1. I actually rewrote and cleaned up a lot of the code on my last team, then without PROD issues and better design, I had a lot of free time because I could easily make changes and not have to deal with screaming users.

I fell in love with node js. I'm motivated again.