This is only true of "unclever" code. You haven't written a lot of code if you haven't found a concise, optimized, abstract way to solve problems that aren't

This is only true of "unclever" code. You haven't written a lot of code if you haven't found a concise, optimized, abstract way to solve problems that aren't intuitive when first seen with the naked eye. We aren't writing books, we're writing instructions for a computer and those two things can sometimes be very, very different.