[BikerJoe]

The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.

Fer Godsakes, they can't architect a system as a set of subsystems, each separately developed and tested, with well-defined interfaces?

[OneWingedShark]

>> The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.
>
> Fer Godsakes, they can't architect a system as a set of subsystems, each separately developed and tested, with well-defined interfaces?

Given that they were using PHP [IIUC], not really.
PHP is pretty much actively hostile to software engineering with it's weak typing, implicit type conversions all over the place, and propensity for "what the hell, let it on through" attitude on errors. (Plus there no separation of interface and implementation, which could go a long way toward modularizing the program's subsystems.)