Obviously this was whimsical when it came out. However...we were creating synthetic data for training and testing OCR in multiple scripts. We would take a web page in some language with a non-Roman script, and reproduce it as multiple PDFs using different fonts. We also added various kinds of blurring, using ImageMagick and---of course---this very coffee stains program!

It's hard to imagine a reason for it being kept... proprietary?

And a squashed fly every thousand pages or so

If only they had stuck with latex maths syntax instead of inventing their own, I would have switched ages ago and encouraged others to do the same...

There’s a bit of resistance sadly. My supervisor is “forcing” me to use LaTeX for my MSc thesis sadly.

Nearly all academia uses MS-OFFICE instead of TeX insanity. Only hardcore phds use it really