In my experience so far, good code strives for elegance. Not only "few LoC" but elegant design, abstractions, structure. With a sufficiently awful design (and "

In my experience so far, good code strives for elegance. Not only "few LoC" but elegant design, abstractions, structure. With a sufficiently awful design (and "wild growth" by engineers just trying to add features), refactorings become tedious because the dependencies, interactions, assumptions etc. that have grown over time are painful to untangle with only equivalence transforms of the code in between. And you can't change easily change the other side of whatever the code interfaces with because it's similarly ingrown.