Comment by userbinator

It was hard to understand their purpose in the grand scheme of things though. Sometimes they were buried deep inside multiple layers of function calls.

I must say this is often true even when I'm looking at the source code. I think the vast majority of software out there is heavily overabstracted, and MCUs have gotten big and cheap enough (two ARM cores in an HDMI capture device!?) that this is appearing in embedded stuff too. This device shouldn't have needed more than one MCU.