Really, if you think the good version is overly clever, you probably have a very fundamental problem with your abstract reasoning. A very human one, as history is full of people having that problem--and ultimately, the good version taking over anyway.

How about this:

    subtract(n){
        if(n==0){
           return m;
        }
        r=m;
        for(x=0;x<n;x++){
            r--;
        }
        return r;
    }

People for a long time had strong objections to a number "0", because it doesn't make sense to have a number for nothing! Why not just have no number at all! 0 is not a number, it's a special case! Wrapping it up in arithmetic like that is just overly clever! After all, 0 is not a number!

The whole problem with that is the preconceived and completely unjustified notion that 0 is not a number. Just accept that 0 is a number, and suddenly, things become much easier to reason about, much more elegant to work with.

Similarly, the whole problem here is that you have the preconceived and completely unjustified idea that removing the first element is a special case. You can define it to be, just as you can define 0 to be a special case. But you could just as well simply let go of that preconceived idea and accept that it's not, and suddenly all the problems that you imagine are there disappear, and you have simpler code, just as having integer types with a zero makes for simpler code.