Why is that weirder? The people writing scientific software are, by and large, less good at writing software than people who only specialize in software development. I’d expect there to tons of terrible engineering practices in an old code base like that
If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.
The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.