In general, cutting-edge astrophysics does not necessarily use cutting-edge software engineering. For example, the JWST also uses a proprietary version of Java

In general, cutting-edge astrophysics does not necessarily use cutting-edge software engineering. For example, the JWST also uses a proprietary version of JavaScript 3, made by a bankrupt company. https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1546908532355657729?s=20&t=kpKCJMbfTu1dhwwWffHr0w https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/15469085323556577... I think there's a pretty good chance that their data encoding scheme was working, and so they just left it in a working state, without upgrading it to use modern best practices.