>it struck me just how lucky i am to work with decent programmers. where this kind of thing is considered quality work, not "showing off".

My rule of thumb is I can write “clever” code if I make sure it would be easy to debug for me or anyone else. This usually includes indented logging for anything complicated, good choice of variable names and plenty of debug assertions that would fail with a meaningful message if something went wrong.

When the deadline comes and you're dealing with an obscure bug in a clever code that looks right but is difficult to reason about, you'll be damning it.