Originally Posted by Taheraliel
Wow, that seems rather short-sighted of Carbonite's original developers especially after Blizzard started to release instance maps. This should have been very obvious two years ago, and now in Mists there are not only Dungeon and Raid maps for everything but also Micro instance maps for Scenarios and practically every cave and earthwork in the game. If they weren't going to put in the time to fix it then, Carbonite should have gone GPL so that it wouldn't be in the crisis recovery mode it is in now.
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From what I've seen poking around in the source code (both the modified source and the original), I'd guess that the original "developers" were following the traditional and "professional" developer design practice of sacrificing robust code for efficiency, both in execution and in generation. While this procedure seems revolting to me, it is perfectly in tune with the business mindset that has prevailed in US software engineering houses. Indeed, in almost all but the largest firms, this practice is still followed to some degree, with the assumption that any bugs down the road can be can be addressed by a quick-n-dirty patch then (the Carbonite code does show indications of several rounds of this kind of quick patching). To be fair, for small development houses, often this stance seems to be the only way to remain profitable in competition with the big companies, but that doesn't make it any better in terms of good coding practices...
Edited to add: I'm talking here about the people Rythal inherited Carbonite from, and trying to explain why "fixing" it might be much more complex than might be expected. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think it's astounding that Rythal has been able to get as much working as there is.