At the time, sharepoint was fairly new In Microsoft's portfolio (IIRC, they bought out another company), and it really was horrendous.
Thankfully it's a lot nicer these days - but I still wouldn't use it as a platform on which to build a web app (yes, we were forced, under great duress to do that - and the result was as awful as you'd expect).
IME, this right here should have seen the entire committee fired.