I’m sure they care that they spent all that time working around an annoying thing — they don’t want to waste time finding a new workaround when this one is patc

I’m sure they care that they spent all that time working around an annoying thing — they don’t want to waste time finding a new workaround when this one is patched. And they’d like to re-use it in other exploit chains, so why not obfuscate it to the best of their ability? You do highlight an important difference between the mindset of an attacker and a defender. The attacker only needs to be right once, and then they can move onto the next phase of the attack. That’s why they don’t bother “understanding it properly” beyond the perspective of attacking it. A medieval siege unit understands the weak points of castle walls, and how to operate a catapult, but they don’t care about the intricacies of stone masonry beyond what’s necessary for knocking down a wall.