If you view eating as a nutrient-delivery process, then yes, you are wrong to despise mashed potatoes. On the other hand, if we view eating as a recreational activity, then you should eat whatever you want. On the gripping hand, tastes can be changed fairly easily - if you eat mashed potatoes a couple of dozen times, you'll learn to tolerate them.

So is programming about pleasure? About delivering business value? Are we artists, engineers, factory workers, craftsmen? How much weight do we give to the programmer's preferences, versus practices that seem to produce better results on average?

But those are not the important questions. The problem is that we can't even begin to answer those questions, because we don't know what is effective "on average", or how to measure those results.