Fine, I'm questioning the idea that the goal should be to maximize an hypotethical "programming skill", something that I'm not sure it even exist, I can only see adherence to different subjective definitions of "clean", "orthogonal" or "simple". What's the point of writing aesthetically pleasing software if it sits unused on Github? If you're lucky you can aim at replacing some old tool doing exactly the same thing with the only added value of satisfying the endless desire for novelty of other programmers. Innovations in software are very rare and almost never come from trial and error but most often from academic research. Why should this endless machine of waste reproduce itself over and over?