To reiterate, you're responding to things I didn't say. Code shouldn't have to be perfectly designed to be readable, and nobody should have to wade through utter crap either. Very often code starts out nice when it has one author or three, and gradually turns to crap as more cooks are added. I want to eliminate that dependency on author churn, to have it be beautiful or ugly based on the capabilities of the programmers involved, not on the difficulty they had understanding those who came before. To make progress on this project, I find it most valuable to utterly ignore aesthetics.

Not necessarily. It can also be indicative of the circumstances in which the code was written. Even great programmers can write terrible code if they are stressed out or overworked. So you can't just look at the code they have written and jump to conclusions about their programming ability.