Welcome to the first part of a two part article on a terrible way to use node references, how it was fixed, and the troubles implementing the solution.
Drupal development as a team is tough: finding a balance between code and configuration saved in the database is one of the hardest challenges to overcome.
Reading about development being code-driven on a software developer's blog is a bit surprising, isn't it? As if development was not all about writing code in this industry.