Really anything can be a good or a bad idea depending on the problem domain and how it's implemented. He doesn't really go into how he made it work too closely, so it's easy to say it was a success. The real interesting thing to understand would be, "Why was it a success versus other approaches?" What really made it a better choice vs other approaches? What was the team make up? He says that it made the code easy to understand. To whom? Interesting the team made it work, but not enough to say, "Sure let's try it without a lot more forethought."