Stored Procedures Gone Wild

Today, I sat in on a code review session for a data access layer of a fairly small project. The lead programmer had used stored procedures for absolutely everything - and I mean everything. If the DAL needed to do an ad-hoc query, then he wrote as many stored procedures to satisfy the parameters. There wasn't a single view in the whole thing. The rest of the review group largely agreed that the stored procedures were out of control and major parts of the project needed to be rewritten. The group guidance was the lead programmer should rewrite implementation the ad-hoc part of the service interface to use views and ad-hoc queries (unless the query "special" and need to be a stored procedure).

As an outsider in this group, my question was less about the merits of stored procedures for this or that, but rather, how did this project get so far a long before there was a code review? Too much of software development is like driving at night with the headlights turned off. At some point, either you crash into something or the lights get turned on and you discover that you aren't where you intended to be.