Even if that were true, and it seems unlikely, that's still an order of magnitude more than the ladybug devs.

It might seem that way but it's a fairly arrogant assertion. They're a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it's easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I'm still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.

Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.