[krick]

First off, you are obviously confusing IATA and ICAO airport codes: ICAO are the 4-letter ones. Second, I do not know why anybody would consider IATA codes a mess. These are just some arbitrary IDs that appeared one by one since some pre-historic times, are insanely informationally dense (just 3 letters, and I cannot remember from the top of my head the exact number, but there are definitely more than 3000 of IATA airport codes) and are very hard to re-assign or organize because of how global and distributed the system is. If anything you should be happy and astonished they resemble city-names in any way at all. Personally, I always found this pretty incredible, that hundreds of small cities with long (and often similar) names manage to have pronounceable and kinda "intuitive" 3-letter codes assigned. They could've been just numbers for that matter (it's not like you have to know them if you don't work in travel — any ticket has city names printed on it nowadays).