[lmm]

The most common maintenance task is reading an entire region of code, which costs in direct proportion to the number of lines. Bugs are also proportional to number of lines of code independently of language, http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/185684 . So no, lines of code is a good metric.

(Though I wouldn't characterize it as "cramming"; better languages save lines by not requiring programmers to specify irrelevant detail rather than by packing more information into the same space).