The core of my algorithm is about 100 lines (about 5000 chars), excluding data types it needs declared and other boilerplate. I can probably golf everything down to under 5000 chars, but it's stupid to screw up my code in such a way, as it's outside the point of this exercise. Moreover, expecting people to write golfed code in the first place teaches bad and unrealistic practices.

5,000 characters is an absurdly low limit for a realistic, non-golfed solution to this problem, at least in Java. My solution to this is around 15,000 characters and it has no verbosity or repetition beyond what's typical for a Java program.