Hi Tom.

@You : "...digital tools nowadays have become to even modest bugdets ..."

Got it :) I agree.

Yes...
ZBrush, 3D-Coat, Moi, Rocket3F/NVIL, Blender, Sketchup, etc etc...

It's really incredible what software developers can offer today at a very low or free price.

But...but...I'm not young :) and I remember that at young days of modern software history (80's, early 90's)
it was almost usual to find and share top quality source code.
In those "days" software developers really struggling so much to produce top quality source code.
I remember well all the strive and the work to produce super optimized source code both with Amiga and Commodore 64.

Nowadays this is not more the rule, but is an exception.

For what actually know and I've tested about the consumer world of CG, I think (and I guess) that today few software deserve to be used as an example : Moi (at least in some of its area like the UX), Affinity Photo for iPad,Rhino (at least for its Grasshopper dev side), Blender, 3D-Coat for how it revolutionized the consumer digital sculpting world, and few others.

IMHO the actual problem of "poor" source code quality are these :

1) Now it's easier to leverage on hardware power (cuda, openCL) of the modern graphics cards.
So even a middle-level quality source code run fast, but not fast as it could.

For example I have a Gtx 1080 Ti and I 'm really disgusted noting how many software have really poor performance even on a beast like that.
Poor source code, poor techniques, only to publish new release as fast as possible.

"Thea Render" is for example an exception to this bad behavior. Superior quality source code without doubts.

2) Today software developers are forced to build new releases faster and faster, and this degrade the source code quality.
Now producing a top-level source code is really expensive, especially for little company or (like Michael) for single person company.

These are my very personal thoughts about actual quality of CG software.

Ciao!

Marco (mkdm)