[trekkin]

Let me try to make my point by a "soft" analogy, in your terminology.

If a fiction book has a great, gripping plot and interesting, relatable, wonderfully done characters, then weird spelling and heavy sentences are not a big deal and can be easily fixed by a competent editor. But nothing can save a very grammatical and clean-written text that is just flat, boring, or makes no sense at all. Ask any publisher - which kind of books they prefer?

Similarly in software, getting the big picture right is much much more important than "elegance" in each individual line.

[gu]

You are setting up a false dichotomy here. Speaking in your analogy, the question is not between grammatical and boring and ungrammatical and exciting, but between a novel that is gripping and grammatical versus one that may be as gripping but wasn't properly edited.