I think you may be reading this article far more harshly than I was. For one, I do not think the person sitting at "sorta works" is necessarily a 'clueless hillbilly'.

In fact, I suspect most serious developers travel up and down this pyramid all the time. Sometimes they are trying to push the state of the art forward, sometimes something that "sorta works" and ships ontime is just fine.

As for "beautiful code" being fault tolerant, it could be argued that any code which is not fault tolerant is not beautiful. I am not sure if that is right or now, but beauty tends to be somewhat subjective and that seems a valid interpretation.