I am in absolute agreement with you on this and I think the problem stems also from the abuse of open source culture. BX attempts to do two things that mean that dolphin in my opinion will FOREVER be a terrible buggy project namely:

1) Foster a closed exclusive and paid support culture (including the notions of a closed community and closed community support with your boonex id etc and licences) This is especially apparent in the way they clearly categorize buggy, incomplete code or whole sections see more of the product as support (eg. paying for foreign language files / people being asked to remove free language files from posts - WTF??)

2) Allow the product to become spaghetti code that is patch upon patch and follows no design rational nor design patterns merely as a method of obfuscation to engender support requests.

...but then again I guess if you are here already you probably know this...

PS you say you ran a rewrite rule to change cc.php and inbox.php to new files do you know what they were?