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> you just don't see how

Always, always assume this is the case - it might frustrate you to no end, but until you have conclusive evidence something is "wrong", it's best to ignore it and toodle along with whatever you're supposed to be working on (I always encounter these head scratchers when working on legacy code, my tasking being something unrelated).

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I would soften this to always consider that possibility. The probability that something is just wrong, or the requirements have evolved in a way that makes it wrong, is probably not that different than the probability the original author had a very strong reason for doing something a certain way and that really did survive the test of time. Considering everything preexisting to be perfect is overly conservative and almost certainly wrong in most real world software engineering scenarios. The history of software engineering is full of examples of things that got replaced with much better things because the original was just not good enough.

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