Great read, I agree with every thing you're saying. I will say that usually we try to take advantage of refactoring every chance we get. If a block of code needs to be refactored and that block of code is going to be exercised by the test plan anyway, unless the scope is huge...refactoring it is kind of a no-brainer. This way we don't have to try to prioritize it as tech debt, which unfortunately, always takes a back seat to feature work.