That may work okay for some places, particularly if your revenue stream is only loosely coupled to the code in question. Personally, the code I work on has a lot of revenue pushed through it every day, in a very quantitative manner. So, refactoring from what it does do to what it "should" do is fairly risky. What looks best to the developer isn't always best for the business, and even if a change is for the better any unexpected changes in the metrics raise flags.
YMMV, but I think that in a organization of any significant size, it's generally a bad idea for developers to make unilateral decisions about how the product should be changed.
