Dr. Sybren remarked on the development forum that the purpose of GSOC is to give students an opportunity to learn to code, contributing to an open source project.
Part of the learning process may ultimately result as “this is not how it should be done.”
If something from that makes it into final, that’s great. It would be awesome if more did. But I think it helps to temper the expectations if we remember what the point of it is, which is not simply free labor to create release-level improvements.
ETA: though I will add that I believe it would be ultimately more beneficial to the user base, if some of these projects were not bikeshedded to death.