I think that the code I'm looking at took things that could have been internal state, and pushed them out to external state, and, ironically, ended up making th

I think that the code I'm looking at took things that could have been internal state, and pushed them out to external state, and, ironically, ended up making them more hidden and opaque in the process. And I think that certain classes of old-school Java programs - specifically, the ones that use toolkits like Hibernate - have evolved a typical pattern for modeling external state that makes it relatively more navigable. The state tends to get proxied through these entity object horcruxes that aren't particularly well camouflaged.