Worse yet, was an initial claim that it was more efficient to do it that way. That was followed up with a claim that doing it differently wasn't possible.
Needless to say, I stopped working with that team of "developers".
This is always the worst. I've had experiences like that on many an occasion, where the person is simply like "huh? what's wrong?"
You can't really fix that level of sheer incompetence, ignorance, and arrogance all wrapped into one.
Sure you can. You can tell them why it's wrong and point them at reading material to fix it. Fixes incompetence and ignorance, and if you're lucky, arrogance. All wrapped into one.
Everyone had to start somewhere.
This is a classic excuse... so what if it leaks e-mail addresses (who looks at source code anyway?), makes clients wait (at least server's CPU is intact), and is just plain illegible (there is always a debugger if you want to fix a bug).
The smartest people I know are acutely aware of how little they actually know compared to how much there is to know.