I didn't miss that, I just chose not to address it for brevity. The problem that highlights is both a process and an experience problem. It indicates that he d

I didn't miss that, I just chose not to address it for brevity. The problem that highlights is both a process and an experience problem. It indicates that he did not have a clear picture of the development road-map for the project, which suggests there are silos of information. There were a lot of hints about this actually. The lack of code reviews (that's where the original dev's opportunity for quality improvement should have been caught and addressed), the fact that a manager would chastise him for trying to improve code quality and the fact that he made poor design choices when trying to improve said quality really does point to a dysfunctional process. Pointing the finger at code quality here is failing to understand the difference between the trees and the forest.