The more time passes, the more i consider coding to have a strong aesthetic component. What makes it complex is that there are two kind of "aesthetics":

- the code itself

- the abstractions that the code represents.

You can have very "clean looking" code (short functions, short files, no repetition, etc. ) that is in fact modeling a problem in the most convoluted way. And the other way around : a bit of repetition, but the concepts behind are completely obvious.

And most of the time, nothing falls completely into one category, and the way you'll decide where to draw the line is almost a matter of taste.