I agree. A lot of times I see people touting the separation of concerns, or the "official spec" for things (like HTTP verbs and REST), and finding workarounds

I agree. A lot of times I see people touting the separation of concerns, or the "official spec" for things (like HTTP verbs and REST), and finding workarounds that still adhere to these specs. I've worked on projects like this, and what ends up happening is you have a solution nobody really likes, a codebase that nobody can really follow, and a whole pile of technical debt that could have been avoided if you just prioritized code quality, readability, and discoverability. Note that I'm not advocating blindly using "whatever has the nicest code", but in a lot of cases, a clean codebase is far better than 100% adherence to specs and guidelines. Write readable code first, optimize it later if you need to.