Indeed, a coworker at a previous job was fascinated/fixated with state machine patterns. After spending two weeks trying to force a process we were paired on in

Indeed, a coworker at a previous job was fascinated/fixated with state machine patterns. After spending two weeks trying to force a process we were paired on into a state machine pattern and failing, I rewrote it in an afternoon without the state machine stuff. It started out small and easy, when there were two states. A third state was manageable but to me already looked like it was going the wrong direction. The fourth state (out of IIRC 6) was never finished.