I am currently in this class and can confirm that navigating the codebase is a nightmare. The specifications we are given in the relevant assignments are vague or wrong and the code itself is pretty questionable. I spend more time trying to understand the assignment and current code than actually writing anything myself. If that's what he's going for, I guess he succeeded.
Sounds like you got yourself a high quality code base!
It's normal for a code base to be over a decade old, during which time it was worked on by a team of a dozen positions, each of which turned over on average every 3 years. So now you've had a few dozen people, each with their own ideas of what's a clear way to express a problem, trying to solve evolving business requirements under tight deadlines. And there's a 50/50 chance the project originally started as a 'throwaway' proof of concept.
