The code is complex, not in “a bad state”. The infrastructure, the build chain which was non existent, the web sites and the age of the libraries used by the 0.9.3b release were the problems. Donations and a new development team are getting those addressed. There was an effort to rewrite Frtizing in Javascript and the new team looked at that and decided the way forward was to improve the original code (which has 10 or 12 years of solid, funded development in it) not a restart. The problem is that the code is not easily dealt with by volunteers, it has had professional developers and likely (supported by the lack many pull requests against the code base even though development has restarted) needs professional developers to succeed. That in turn needs a revenue source, and thus the donations and this thread. I have a couple of fixes in the current release so I have first hand experience with how hard making changes is. The code is good. the few comments that are present point to the way forward that the original designers forsaw, it is just extremely complex and not documented, and there is no one that I have ever found from that knows the code and will communicate.
Peter