In fact, I see this as an opportunity to build anew and better. When you're no longer constrained by legacy baggage and constraints, you can collapse layers and introduce new ones that better fit what you're creating.

I'm doing that in the project I'm working on at work. Being able to redefine how serialization/deserialization fundamentally works and interfaces with domain objects is giving us unbelievable expressiveness, not by the amount of code written (in fact, it's heavily factorized across layers that were historically separate), but by exploring new designs paradigms.

Don't just read these books. Write some new ones.