I've come to believe that 'clever' solutions are almost always a bad idea. You should err on the side of best practices. Defying expected norms means that other

I've come to believe that 'clever' solutions are almost always a bad idea. You should err on the side of best practices. Defying expected norms means that other people aren't going to be able understand your code or maintain it. This is a pretty spectacularly bad example of that. I've actually worked on sites that did similar stuff to this - having multiple versions of the code checked out on the same server with references to files in specific commits.