NOTE: I am a software developer - but I'm not and never have been writing any code for this game as far as I know.
This idea should have been presented when the developers originally started to develop the game. It's been enhanced and hacked until it was stretched to the limits. Nobody ever thought of ATGM missiles thru the barrel and no HEAT ammo for 2nd, 3rd or 4th weapon. Some of these have been corrected using the special values (such as 222 for AP penetration to look up corresponding HEAT value etc.) Enormous task done bit by bit and a lot of things could've been written otherwise in the beginning. But like Don said, this was written when 1MB was considered a lot of memory to have and thanks to the PC design, not even that was actually available but 640 kB was it.
It retrospect there's a lot of things that could've been written otherwise. But like in any software project, in the end it looks like this:
http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2...e_of_a_swe.png