That seems more like paint to me, which is certainly important in its own right, but not the core focus of an architect, or what I think the parent was trying t

That seems more like paint to me, which is certainly important in its own right, but not the core focus of an architect, or what I think the parent was trying to convey. The architect is more concerned with structure and conveying feeling to other people – which is other programmers in the case of code. Attention to aesthetics is important, but those aesthetics are more like how to appropriately use whitespace to evoke a sense of beauty when the next person catches a glimpse of your work in a text editor, to ensure that the reader understand that "a door is a door and not a window", things like that.