>It was hard for me to write them off as people who just didn't understand how modern computers work.

I'm glad you didn't fall for that trap. Software engineers constantly make excuses for doing things in idiotic ways. Almost nothing I use really works anymore. It just "kind of" works most of the time. Look at your average web applicaton and the ridiculous resources it takes to get the thing up on the screen and interacting with the user. We've become addicted to high powered machines and finding more complex and inefficient ways of doing the same things.