[brigandish]

This is depressingly familiar. I can't tell you the number of times I've got an error, searched, ended up on StackOverflow reading the answer, full of stuff I have no knowledge of. Get to the end, it was answered by me. More than twice.

Seriously.

I'm now more obsessed with documentation and the kind of code structuring you mention and have come to hate, viscerally, projects that lack documentation.

As a potential aside, I once took a course in ASP. We had a bit of time before the class started and the tutor had a chat with a couple of us. Some huge government projects were in the news for having failed and gone well over budget. He told me he'd worked for the company behind them and that they used to obfuscate the code just by stripping out all the comments so the government had to keep going back to them for work.

I think of that any time I hear "but the code is the documentation"…