I don't think it really matters who is going to maintain the code in the future. Even if you think you're going to be the sole person maintaining the code for a

I don't think it really matters who is going to maintain the code in the future. Even if you think you're going to be the sole person maintaining the code for a long time, why is being "as clever as you can" a win? 5 years down the line in a large system, you might not remember the reasoning behind your earlier cleverness anyway. The complexity in a program should come from the problem it is attempting to solve, not the trickiness of the implementation. I personally prefer code that is as simple as possible (but no simpler, to coin a phrase) -- there are enough things that can go wrong in a complex software system without adding overly-clever code into the picture. I think one of the primary guiding principles of software design ought to be simplicity: strive to make everything as simple as possible, except where other requirements like efficiency, robustness, functionality, or portability supersede.