Absolutely but if he was relatively inexperienced, which is somewhat likely for a college student, he may have fallen victim to believing that he'd remember it

Absolutely but if he was relatively inexperienced, which is somewhat likely for a college student, he may have fallen victim to believing that he'd remember it all when he came back to it. Afterall, it's all fresh in his mind and all makes sense when he's making the decision to strip all of that out instead of adding the preprocessing step. After getting burnt a time or two, one learns to ignore the current state of mind and realize things will be very different a year later.