Good taste often comes from experience. And not just any experience, either. It comes from working with other peoples' "great ideas" and "brilliant hacks" and

Good taste often comes from experience. And not just any experience, either. It comes from working with other peoples' "great ideas" and "brilliant hacks" and "genius architectures". When you're the person having to maintain them a decade later, you start to see whether they were great and brilliant and genius, or just clever but bad ideas. You start to develop a taste that says "that feels too complicated for what it does" or "that's not clear enough". Or, sometimes, "yeah, that really is about as simple as it can be." It's hard to defend that taste to someone who doesn't have it. They say, "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man". And in fact they're right. But it's an opinion honed by a fair amount of real-world experience, of seeing how fine-sounding ideas fail to work out in the long run.