Reverse engineers can manage to stare at assembly and figure things out. Every programmer can learn the skills of staring at really fucked up representations of logic and eventually figure things out. It's definitely slower of course.

Now is definitely not the time for a rewrite. As much of a trap this seems to be, it's actually the best move given the circumstances.

I may actually take IBM up on this since my father was a COBOL programmer, but I wouldn't plan to make a career of it.