So I signed on with a startup web development company as a subcontractor. They are putting together a large, complex user/product management system for a company that needs to support multiple levels of hierarchial localization. I signed a 3 month contract, and upon looking at their code, wish I hadn't.

They opted to write their own MVC framework (I guess the client company didn't want to use a prewritten one) and it's extremely poorly written. There's SQL scattered throughout almost every model view and controller (and there's no parameter-based find methods, it's all SQL) and they haven't even THOUGHT about localization yet-- something that will have an affect on nearly EVERY query.

The due date is 4 months away, and I honestly think we'd make good progress by scrapping the whole thing and going with CakePHP. Have any of you been in a similar situation, and what did you do?

PS: This is written in PHP/MySQL.