At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new version to see if we need to implement anything new in our software.

For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To calculates something (eg. a specific wind load or seismic load), you just read the section from top to bottom and follow the recipe. Things are actually placed in the order that an engineer would use them.

With the US code, you have to deal with triple negations and 80% of the usefully information is presented as references to other sections. It's really not fun trying to understand it when a single sentence will link you to 8 paragraphs, 6 of which are in a completely different chapters or sub-chapters. And as you can imagine, these 8 paragraphs will also have their own references to other part of the code. It's a complete mess that is impossible to follow unless you write your own summary and/or take screenshots and rearrange them in order.

You end up with a situation where even experienced engineers can't understand it and have to rely on notes from colleagues, college textbooks, calculation examples, or they just blindly follow the design software they bought.

Working the support line for a high end structural analysis and design software has really opened my as to how incompetent and lazy a lot of the senior engineer from highly reputable firm can be. It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too.