>but you could give me two black boxes that act the same externally, one written as a single line , single character variables, etc. etc. etc. and another written to be readable, and I wouldn't care so long as I wasn't expected to maintain it.

The reality of software products is that they are in nearly in all cases developed/maintained over time, though--and whenever that's the case, the black box metaphor fails. It's an idealization that only works for single moments of time, and yet software development typically extends through the entire period during which a product has users.

> I read OPs "good code" to mean "highly aesthetic code" (well laid out, good abstractions, good comments, etc. etc.)

The above is also why these properties you've mentioned shouldn't be considered aesthetic only: the software's likelihood of having tractable bugs, manageable performance concerns, or to adapt quickly to the demands of its users and the changing ecosystem it's embedded in are all affected by matters of abstraction selection, code organization, and documentation.