Really interesting post. I have often worked in such a mess of a code even though in orders of magnitude smaller code bases with only a few developers. I would never imagine a project like oracle is like this. Since there seem to be a number of oracle employees around, I would be very interested to know if there have been any propositions to start cleaning up this shit. The man hours wasted from this workflow is so huge that I expect that even a small percent of oracle's developers could be assigned to rewrite it and they would catch up the rest of the product in a reasonable time frame so that in a few years it could be rewritten and stop wasting developers' time.