The first one -- I read it, I know what it does, it seems intuitive to understand, and I expect it to be bug-free especially because the edge case is explicitly accounted for. If someone else has to modify it later, I'm not particularly worried they'll mess it up.
The second one -- it took me about 4x longer to understand what it does. It works too, but it doesn't match how my brain naturally thinks about it, so it leaves me with the uneasy feeling "what if there's a bug?" and I'd be more worried someone else would introduce a bug if they had to modify it later.
I don't want "elegance" or "good taste" in code. Unless it has a good reason to be hand-tuned for performance, I want code that is written the way you'd expect an average programmer to write it. Nothing clever, just a straightforward translation of requirements into code. Not "transforming" them into something more "elegant".