[AstralStorm]

That is some interesting definition of genius you put in here. Usually the criticism of so called genius code is about manual optimization and sometimes domain specific optimization and not about crust achieved over years of lacklustre maintenance.

There ate actual real reasons you shouldn't or cannot write dumb code. One piece of such "cruft" is handling numerical corner cases which is unavoidable unless proven mathematically to be impossible (And commented why). Using IEEE floating point? Guess you get to handle ULP precision, NaN and Inf. Using integers? Welcome to wraparound. Memory management? What happens if an allocation fails? Threads? Race freedom is quite interesting to achieve.

Using Java? Then figure out what happens when you choke GC with hundreds of objects. Etc.

You can only go so far in passing the buck to library authors, they can make mistakes too.