Now here is a very important point I think you are unaware of, much of the time XMR devs have spent have been on commenting the code. This is a tribute to the dedication of a team that believes in a project even if they in fact are not there to continue. Without proper documentation any programmer no matter how gifted will spend an inordinate amount of time just mapping code before he/she can make a change which is directly proportional to the length and/or complexity of the code. By spending time to make the inherited code readable for new programmers the core team is making their own presence less important as the project progresses.