Nice and arbitrary. And of course Working As Intended.

This is hardly unexpected. The code needed to process data from science experiments can be years in the making by one or few persons sculpting it to do the job they need done. It might be a bit much to say that it's throw-away code, but once the paper is out the door it probably won't see much use again.

All of this combined with the fact that the coders are scientists and thus aren't concerned with UI issues and whatnot make it so it may take a lot of manual intervention at various steps to use the software, but in the end the science gets done... and you make a neat gun for the people who are still alive </portalroll>.