>All I need now is a small piece of code to wade through 2 files or 40,000 lines to find where they differ. Woe is our society from such lame duck programmers.

You can find stupid things everywhere. Why are you surprised? I've seen stupid solutions even in places where just hammer and nails are the tools to use. And it's not even a matter of being stupid vs intelligent, it's that people do things absentmindedly, not stopping to think it through before swinging the hammer.

And guess what - the society was like that since forever. I think we're actually smarter, as a civilization, than we were a generation or two ago. Okay, maybe not... I've seen things solved long ago becoming a problem again. But we still go on, live and... yup, vent our frustration at times :).