" > if you have hired a CTO who is better at engineering than you

He doesn't do development himself(he does review everything before it goes into the production branch), simply that he knows better developers than I.

I have re-written much of our original code to a point where it is of good quality, both in it's intended role and in readability. "

The CTO hasn't written any production code so his software skills are questionable. The OP belives his current code is of good quality right now.