I always interpreted most polymorphism as sloppy context-specific state-machine embedding, and fundamentally an unmaintainable abomination from OOP paradigms.

I always interpreted most polymorphism as sloppy context-specific state-machine embedding, and fundamentally an unmaintainable abomination from OOP paradigms. OO requires a lot of planning to get right (again, no shop will give your team time to do this properly), and in practice it usually degenerates into spiral development rather quickly (<2 years). Thus, 14 years later what you think you see in documentation may be completely different from the conditional recursive definition some clown left for your team (yes, it happens eventually...) 500k lines is not that bad if most of it is encapsulated libraries... =)