Yes but as I said yesterday on another post, "Yngwie Malmsteen Code".
You could write it clearly by saying foo[1] instead of *(foo+1) which is what they ended up doing, but hey, pointer arithmetic looks complicated and clever, so let's show off with a WEEDLYWEEDLYWEEDLY guitar solo bit of code.
When you are manipulating (mostly) one pointed-to element at a time, and incrementing the pointer itself in between, then that's quite a different mindset compared to using an index into an array. I agree that the subscript operator is the cleanest solution here. My point is just that I think it was missed because it's easy to overlook, rather than because, as you say, someone is deliberately trying to be too clever.
You could write it clearly by saying foo[1] instead of *(foo+1) which is what they ended up doing, but hey, pointer arithmetic looks complicated and clever, so let's show off with a WEEDLYWEEDLYWEEDLY guitar solo bit of code.