The thing there is, all design patterns and coding practices are less than ideal. People pick the best way they can come up with at a time and place, and every

The thing there is, all design patterns and coding practices are less than ideal. People pick the best way they can come up with at a time and place, and everything is hunky-dory for one fleeting moment, and then the moment is gone. Any code that's good enough to survive will see the world change around it, until you've got a system that was developed for one niche and then spent years evolving into a new one as business and technical requirements changed, and will have plenty of quirks to show for it. A good programmer can deal with that.