Consider where the company is right now - they're entirely reliant on a third party product that doesn't suit their needs. Every codebase is maintainable (to a certain extent), and the first step in getting a long term maintainable code base is... getting a code base.

Freelancers don't inherently write better or worse code than FTE's. Some of the most braindead, unreadable, undefendable code I've seen has been written by FTE's while contractors are leaving them in their dust.