Code that is easy to work with is usually that way because the author went out of their way to make it easy to work with, often this takes 2-3x as long to write

Code that is easy to work with is usually that way because the author went out of their way to make it easy to work with, often this takes 2-3x as long to write as normal code that just works. Publicly exposed api's typically get this special attention and internal things get the normal spaghetti treatment.