Keep in mind that the spaceflight is systems-first; most development effort usually goes into the hardware and systems/mission design, the code has less priorit

Keep in mind that the spaceflight is systems-first; most development effort usually goes into the hardware and systems/mission design, the code has less priority and nearly zero decision freedom, so most of the complexity is baked into specs and requirements. In that sense, it's the appropriate area for a thing like this. It's also true for certain niches in industrial automation. That said, in my experience, the Soviet tech industry workforce was separated into three very distinct categories since the ~70s: enthusiasts (people who came into it to actually build the tech; they delivered most of the result, and were the first to leave after the crash), opportunists (people who used it as a social elevator/welfare program and couldn't care less about the result), and crackpots (underperforming idealists who couldn't be fired, but still won't shut up about their wonderful idea, so they've been filtered into containment projects which were only meant to exist on paper). Drakon is giving off the strong vibes of something created by the last category.