Elegant interfaces for complex hardware and industrial systems

Your developers are excellent at what they were actually hired to do: writing code that works. Design was never part of the job.

So when a dashboard needed a new screen, or a workflow needed one more field, someone made a reasonable, defensible engineering decision and moved on.

Do that a hundred times over a few years and you get software that runs fine but was never really designed — inconsistent patterns, unclear hierarchy, and an interface that makes complete sense to the person who built it, and almost no one else.