The good point is that other hacked together quasi-compatible implementations now have an "official" reference implementation to browse. It could be a lot worse... I've waded through uncommented OCaml to discover how a certain shall-go-unnamed commercial, non-restful XML API worked. Or, Cisco could've never open-sourced it.
I'm not in to video circles anymore, but I was under the impression the existing open source implementations were way better. The reason this code is significant is Cisco is providing licensed binaries.