[mr_toad]

The spaghetti code approach is basically an expert system. An old school algorithmic AI. Outside constrained domains these systems never really performed very well. Reality is just too messy.

Having a system where you can see why it works the way it does is all very well, but not if it keeps giving the wrong answers. In real world use getting the right answer is often more important than knowing how you got that answer.

[zelphirkalt]

You can make an expert system extensible though. You can make it definitely recognize some pattern and when there is a complaint about it not recognizing another pattern, you can add it. Hopefully you wrote the code in a way that easily allows adding new patterns, of course.