Nobody worked hard on making sure people could remove fences without understanding them ..., so this principle is not protected.
This seems false to me. I agree with Stuart's opening suggestion that democracy, free markets, and the Enlightenment more generally are in part designed to make it easy to dismantle historical patterns (e.g. religion, guilds, aristocracy, traditions; one can see this discussion explicitly in e.g. Adam Smith, Locke, Toqueville, Bacon). Bostrom's "status quo bias" also comes to mind.
Chesterton's meta-fence: "in our current system (democratic market economies with large governments) the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences is a process which seems well established and has a decent track record, and should not be unduly interfered with (unless you fully understand it)".