> it's hard to talk about this stuff if we're not clear on which types of projects we're talking about.

It mystifies me when people don't intuit this.

For any suitably sized project, there are parts where elegance and friction removal are far more important than others. By an order or two of magnitude.

I have shipped beautifully-honed, highly craft code. Right alongside jank that was debugged in the "Well it seems to work now" and "Don't touch anything behind this in-project PI" category.

There are very good reasons and situations for both approaches, even in one project.