> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.
Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.
Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience).
Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.
In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.
Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.