I have read articles here and there about how much of a patchwork mess Mac OS was by the time they got to OS 9.
First of all, anyone who has used it knows how beautiful and seamless the 68K emulator is. It's baked in at a very low level, and you don't even realize you're running a 68K native program unless you go looking for it. That was the intention, and it made the 68K-PPC transition go as well as possible. In fact, up through the end of PowerPC, you could theoretically run every single Macintosh program ever written going back to 1984.
It's my understanding, though, that the emulator was SO good that major parts of the OS were still 68K native right up to the end, and depended on the emulator to run. I would wonder if, in 2002, there was even anyone at Apple who completely understood OS 9.