This is a really good point and it almost feels a little Kantian, so it seems to make sense to me. But the trouble is, when I speak of hacks, I don't mean thing

This is a really good point and it almost feels a little Kantian, so it seems to make sense to me. But the trouble is, when I speak of hacks, I don't mean things like defining rand() = 6. I mean things that seem really weird but after some thought, it seems to be correct. E.g. you had to add bunch of if cases to an algorithm due to some weird library requirement, and after hours of debugging the reason starts making sense and after hours of stress-testing, your algorithm produces the correct result. It's always possible you need to add more ifs and you're missing something OR the fact that you had to add ifs indicate your algorithm is not correct etc. Even after you feel comfortable a hack is good to go, that hack can still be a bug. Who knows? Engineering is all about the wisdom to decide whether something works or needs more work. It's truly amazing how stable most things are; but when you're familiar with the inner workings of a system, you're MUCH more self-conscious of possible catastrophic failures. Like, when you start reading about diseases in Wikipedia, you suddenly start checking yourself if you have those symptoms...