As long as it does not deviate into getting really creative with the spec, keeping everything consistent is overrated in my opinion. There are the exceptions o

As long as it does not deviate into getting really creative with the spec, keeping everything consistent is overrated in my opinion. There are the exceptions of very widely used projects where contributors will only look at the code a couple times when making a change to be pushed upstream or where there are significantly junior developers that need a narrow scope of the language to help them with the learning curve and getting up to speed with the code base. In my experience(which is very anecdotal I admit), the requirement for consistency is more about a particular personality trait that many developers have - the need for order and control - as opposed to a requirement for quality production code.