No, it's not "a mess." People who write it follow a lot of rules. The problem is, following rules just "because it should be done so" and uncritically applying them leads to very weird things (^) I believe you haven't seen what a lot of programmers working under bad lead can produce in a year of two out of the simple goals... Really experienced programmers don't "overengineer."

(^) It looks like: "public class RecursiveFactorialImplementation implements FactorialAlgorithm" from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143310