It causes readers to either slap their foreheads and say 'oh wow, 200 lines? I could have done that! why didn't I think of it?' or 'oh wow, it takes true genius to hit just the right 200 lines. I could have never done that!', the common factor being 'oh wow'

Number of lines is used as a proxy for complexity, especially among those who are less familiar with how the programming sausage is made (management, non-IT folks, etc.). To non-technical folks, it sounds pretty impressive that you can do a simple change (low # of lines) and get a huge improvement. Nevermind the fact that behind those couple of lines could be days of code analysis and several rewrites. It's the allure of the easy, "why didn't I think of that" kind of thing.

Right. I'd also hazard a guess that it is not right to compare kernel-mode C to a shell script on a line-for-line basis.

I imagine when you're talking about a code base the size of the Linux kernal, there is likely something to be said for code brevity. (There is also something to be said for "readable")