> That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this. Especially since I assume it wasn't just a single person doing the coding.

One screenshot showed an SQL error.

I think if you're doing an one man job, under pressure, making an app that has limited scalability, the last thing you should be doing is not using some kind of ORM or something similar (especially at a login page)

So it looks like they made it unnecessarily hard on themselves.