Yes yes, I agree with all that. I much prefer to discuss approach with someone senior before tackling hairy problems and have others look at my approach after

Yes yes, I agree with all that. I much prefer to discuss approach with someone senior before tackling hairy problems and have others look at my approach after the fact to improve. But since I often work with clients where I am the dev team, I rely on my professional network to discuss approach. Agree that getting a technical review from a third party isn't a bad idea. FWIW this doesn't change my main point: the business owner cares about outcomes, and not code structure (a good outcome is dependent on the code being good enough to maintain e.g. the house not falling down). There's a simple test for this BTW: write lited, beautiful code that doesn't solve the business problem you were hired to solve and see how popular you are with your client.