I agree - I think that the 'framework' is one of the issues with the time it takes - there is not really a defined framework for dolphin - it seems to be a little better with version 7 (to me it seems that most of the changes with D7 were not feature changes but simply re-writing existing code to follow a more structured architecture - lots of variable / database renaming and moving of files and functions) but there are still plenty of things that are 'tacked on'.

IMO a bad framework becomes see more even harder to manage when there are multiple contributors, as unless you are working on stuff you wrote yourself, at least half the time is spent trying to figure out what the previous softy has done. There is also a distinct lack of comments in Dolphin - comments help save time when looking through code - they are not necessarily just an explanation for lesser mortals - it probably takes less than a second to read and digest a comment, whereas it takes a lot longer to read and digest a line (or more) of code - all those seconds eventually add up.

I also find that there is a lot of spaghetti in the code, which does not help matters. Spaghetti logic is a term in my industry for unnecessarily, over complicated, too-many-layer, code. It used to be an intentional thing to obfuscate code, and therefore generally only be understandable by the original softy, hence making them a veritable coding hero and always ensure them of the job. But it is also a style of coding that is associated with those who don't know what they are doing - bit's tacked on to other bits tacked on to other bits...

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