Verbose code is one thing but multiple adjoining layers of abstraction, or excessive modularization can both make maintaining code very difficult as well. Both dense and bloated solutions had goals other than doing the simplest thing that might possibly solve the immediate problem. That is the only worthy goal, it ensures maintainability due to its simplicity and any extensibility loss is offset by that simplicity. Most of the designed in extensibility I've seen predicted the wrong sort of extension that would be needed anyway.