I'd be more willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't so blatant in proposing that the solution he likes is the Really Good Solution that h

I'd be more willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't so blatant in proposing that the solution he likes is the Really Good Solution that has no downsides besides being "hard to understand". As if that wasn't a major downside in and of itself. That said, being annoyingly cock-sure when you have the chops to back it up with an actual ideal solution is one thing, the same attitude when you present a questionably engineered algorithm and blatantly disregard its drawbacks (up to ~2x higher runtime / more "reads" needed to generate an answer) by implying only the less intelligent "non-artisans" would ever fail to appreciate it is entirely different.