> Elegance is not a real metric
While I agree with this in spirit, I once made the observation that:
"Code quality can be measured by the number of occurrences of 'WTF' uttered by other developers per minute when reading a PR."
Elegance might be subjective, but how easy code is to read and understand probably can be quantified even if we don't have the best tooling for that yet.
Meaning that if 10 engineers less experienced than me all tell me that they think expressing something one way is easier to understand than another, I take that as objective feedback and change course.