One other benefit for me personally is that finding this little chunk of code really demystified a lot of what was happening. It’s been a few years but I still recall the aha tingles from the whole thing.

I suck at assembly but this proved to be a nice spot to hack away at it (with copious googling) to even further improve my understanding of not only the instrumentation but the effects that mutations had on program execution.

So for me worse was definitely better.