you guessed it right, this is India. developers have <5 years of exp and they are without formal training. however as you said they are clever and have not done bad coding. i.e. they have not done messy code which can not be understood by other developers or not according to the standard.

infact that is where cakephp helped us a lot. it does not allow you to take too much room while developing so you have to try hard to do bad coding in there.

Your suggestion is well taken but I am not sure whether there is a need to rewrite the code.