I personally don't think this is the correct way of looking at this situation. Good code as it stands is code that produces an application that fulfills the re

I personally don't think this is the correct way of looking at this situation. Good code as it stands is code that produces an application that fulfills the requirements without breaking until someone naturally thinks to replace it. If you can achieve that you can achieve something better then most "good code" I've seen in my lifetime. Good code is something that isn't obtrusive to the end user (the most important user of the code). I don't know of another way of putting this but "easy to maintain" code is a different thing. Some small piece of software could have been messily globed together and thrown into production. This piece of software could have been running for 15 years+. I still think that's good code, but it is not inherently "easy to maintain." We shouldn't be striving for 1 goal, we have two that are close to similarly important. We have maintainability by a programmer, and you have ease of use from the client. To make the small fraction of people who are software devs live's better, we focus on "easy to maintain' code. To make everyone's life better we need to focus on that and making functionally sufficient code. Very few projects I've seen do both. They either aim to be 100% clean code while sacrificing features that greatly improve UX or either 100% functional while being globed together unorganized messes. I think we need to think of good code as a project that fulfills it's entire reason for existence while being documented and maintainable (on both the UX and maintaining side of things).