This is a blatantly false dichotomy--how fun and clever code is is not inversely proportional to how much fun it is. If anything, I've found the opposite to be

This is a blatantly false dichotomy--how fun and clever code is is not inversely proportional to how much fun it is. If anything, I've found the opposite to be true: the code I have the most fun writing is also the code I find easiest to maintain. My latest side project--writing an interpreted language in Haskell--has been extremely fun and disconcertingly maintainable. Being able to add complicated features that I thought would take a while in a couple of lines of code is just eerie. Coincidentally, this brings up my second point: writing maintainable code makes the latter 90% of programming (debugging and adding features after the fact) more fun. I think it's a win.