Also consider the amounts paid. Programmer time does costs, so not only did they get bad programmers, good programmers don't work that cheap. But they were no

Also consider the amounts paid. Programmer time does costs, so not only did they get bad programmers, good programmers don't work that cheap. But they were not paying the time that even bad-medium programmer would need to do testing/research to improve their programs. Just for my own personal stuff I will spend weeks getting in right, profile the code, checking behavior for a range of unlikely inputs, and do web search to see how others did the same type of program and if they have better ideas than me. For a 100-200 Euro payment I don't see how you could make money if you did all that. You get what you pay for. PS. Plain text and Base64! I did not know they were that bad, I learnt not to do that years ago as a teenager running a BBS on a C64.