>I've always thought that accounting is arithmetic made difficult
It basically is. The fact that operations like "debit" and "credit" behave differently based on the sign-convention of the account is legacy baggage that should have been done away with a literal millennium ago. The whole situation is as absurd as if physicists decided that the concept of a "negative" voltage was a bad thing so KVL was formulated as sum{delta_sources} = sum{delta_loads} instead of just sum{delta_voltage} = 0, and then people had to memorize under which conditions circuit elements were treated as sources instead of loads, and when anyone questions why it's all so confusing they just get told that's the way things have always been done.
I'm the rare old timer accountant with some programming background
I definitely agree with you though my approach to analyzing activity/preparing detailed reports/etc. is to, at a first step, convert all credits to negative numbers and retain all debits as positive
Further, most charts of accounts are designed in some sane way that you can easily tell what type of account it is (asset/liability/capital/P&L)
The challenge isn't usually managing/interpreting these things but making sure you are interpreting contracts and guidance properly/consistently so you don't upset ownership or your auditors with unanticipated changes/revisions...