I'd say it is a success at being useful, but yeah it does seem like the code itself has been a bit of a mess.

I've used a version that had a bd stats and a bd status that both had almost the same content in slightly different formats. Later versions appear to have made them an alias for the same thing. I've also had a version where the daemon consistently failed to start and there were no symptoms other than every command taking 5 seconds. In general, the optimization with the daemon is a questionable choice. It doesn't really need to be _that_ fast.

And yet, even after all of that it still has managed to be useful and generally fairly reliable.