I agree with everything you've said in your reply but it does not contradict what I said. To be more specific, the "defined standards" (docs, tests etc) are me

I agree with everything you've said in your reply but it does not contradict what I said. To be more specific, the "defined standards" (docs, tests etc) are measures of what makes something better or worse. They aren't a measure of what is good. What is good is if those docs, tests etc are superior to the docs, tests etc of other code. And we are right where back to the relative measure problem. One could come up with an objective measure of "good" which would require a threshold for these measures. Such a measure would require us to say that a project is good if the docs are of such and such standard, the test coverage >60%, the names can be understood by most people and so forth. However, I think that standard would still be informed by what most people do. To put it another way, if we waved a magical wand and everyone started documenting and testing starting tomorrow, then "good" code would require something else.