Eh, I'm not going to rant on it much. Most generally the code I catch from my coworkers or other companies is just poor code by the standards of any normal software industry. It works fine, mostly when run within the constraints of its environment, but its fucking impossible to read, impossible to maintain, and falls all over itself the moment operations tries making it do things that weren't intended at initial design. Most of the issues I encounter are just generally result of user error because the code is so shit the maintainability hinders the ability to do anything with it.

You're right that most SCADA/PLC IDE suuuuucks when held in comparison to most modern software tools. There's been good efforts made by manufacturers in the last 5 years or so to step up. I figure the big driver is attacks on ICS are becoming more prominent and popular so they've been forced to move quicker on modern updates that allow things like monitoring tools, diff, version control and all that to be actually integrated into their software suites.

Generally the problem is that a lot of Control Systems are stagnant systems. They don't change for decades, and that mentality is sorta baked into the industry so lots of deliverables are kinda treated with the type of mentality that if it passes testing it's good. But that thinking is quickly becoming obsolete. So much more of ICS is being integrated to business systems for monitoring everything and finding efficiencies, retooling lines, reporting, tracing, maintaining, etc. etc.