Reading these forums every day leads me to wonder if there is even one system left within Trainz that does not have a bug in it? It seems every aspect that used to work properly has some kind of problem now. I hope that's just my perception and not reality.
Your perception is pretty sharp, unfortunately.
What has happened is pretty simple. In the beginning the program was written by people that actually used it. As time went on these people left due to many reasons including the fiasco they called Fury. This left a new management team, and a new Brew Crew, though a couple of senior members remained.
When new versions came out, they reused older code without really knowing what was going on. This is not uncommon and perhaps things weren't touched because when you touch older code it breaks, and when it breaks it breaks other things. I think of it as a giant sweater made of wool. You pull one thread and everything starts to fall apart. Well the same thing can happen with programs because so much stuff is intermixed and intermingled among the different modules.
The other things too is these people had no history with the product, meaning they had no understanding of what was supposed to happen. This is not uncommon either, and is actually getting worse because of the contractual nature of programming jobs. The programmers in many cases are freelance and float between projects, they code and leave. They are not responsible for anything other than the code they write. The problem is they have no understanding of the whole picture.
So we have a team that comes in for a project, writes code, gets stuff done. The product is sold and then upgrades and fixes come along. These are now met with a new team of programmers. Sometimes the company is lucky and can bring back some of the same ones or the same programmers, but that's rare. The new team now makes their changes and usually breaks stuff in the process.
Such is the life in the fast lane...
John