Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But, I think there are cases where it's quite obvious that one solution is "cleaner" than the other. Sometimes a refactor

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But, I think there are cases where it's quite obvious that one solution is "cleaner" than the other. Sometimes a refactor is just strictly better in all ways. I once had a service that wrapped a core algorithm in our code, but the code for the server and the code for that algorithm were all jumbled together. It became hard to write tests for the algorithm because the server wanted sockets and a specific protocol and blah blah blah. So, I simply separated them - the server instantiated the algorithm and called simple functions in it. Tests could do the same - it was strictly better in every sense - it made each part easier to reason about, test, read, understand... And with no real performance difference. "Clean"