That is really ugly code.
think about all the other things perfectionist coders and product managers could be working on
In general I would like to achieve the functional goal of the present in the most expedient way possible. If cruft and technical debt from being expedient yesterday is slowing me down, it's time to refactor.
Trying to write perfect code from the start is a fool's enterprise. Often times the full requirements and constraints of a problem will not make themselves known until you're halfway done solving it, or until you're on to the next related problem. Front-loading architecture and software design work often means solving problems you don't really have, or painting yourself into a corner when it turns out the problem is not exactly what you thought it was.
My favorite example is probably how the "AJAX" voting works: when you vote, the Javascript creates a new <img> tag with the src= attribute set to the vote endpoint, so when the browser tries to load that "image" it does a background request.
It's the kind of dirty hack that hasn't been necessary for an extremely long time and could be replaced with a proper method in minutes, but nobody even notices that's how it works.
You can still often have better than done, though. The first working implementation is rarely the best possible one.