[morbidhawk]

> it is easier to 'surgically' modify a single method that does one simple thing, than adjust one tiny piece of a much larger function

I would agree for the most part but modifying one small function might cause unwanted side-effects when that function is reused elsewhere (tooling that reports references can help this). A good descriptive function name could help as well. When a function is not meant to be used in multiple places another option is writing a nested function, there might be arguments against that but that helps keep the number of possible method branchings to a better minimum