[eternalban]

Your comment touches on the awol concept of clarity in this conversation: "The quality of being coherent and intelligible".

Balls of mud are the very essence of simplicity (in one sense) yet lacking any clarity.

Clarity is a (bad sort of) hot commodity in an immature yet rapidly developing technical field. In our field this is exacerbated by the fact that the entire field can be viewed as a monument to the peter principle (but thankfully the imposter syndrome is there as a collective salve for us all.)

I think highly intelligent engineers that can penetrate the essence of a problem and come up with effective & coherent conceptual models are a valuable but (in places) untimely assets. My recommendation to such engineers (who also wish to be responsible team members) is to recognize the cognitive impedance mismatch and broaden the 'scope' of the solution to include the human element, and descend to norm if necessary. The ultimate goal is to serve a broader goal, and fighting against impedance mismatch is un-/counter-productive.

My personal red line is the 'big ball of mud' teams.