It's a balancing act: balancing elegance of design vs. simplicity.
Simple is frequently a lot easier to maintain than elegant. You have to pick somewhere in between.
In an ideal world all the code would be very simple and very elegant. Unfortunately you don't have enough time to do everything ideally. Because this is not about delivering perfect code, its about delivering business functionality!
If I could spend an infinite amount of time working on a project, I would make perfect code... but I am spending somebody else's money working...

--Jeff Norris, IT matters #2