>>>>Best practise over time is dictated by experts and available public or commercial sources (such as frameworks). It might not be your piece of cake, nor mine, but certainly is accepted by a large portion of the development community.
>>>
>>>My experience is that ultimately the right way to do things is the way the person who signs the checks wants them done.
>>>If the check signer thinks that all walls should be painted Chinese red, then Chinese red will ultimately be everyone's favorite wall color because the dissenters will either leave or go batty.
>>>This might sound cynical, but I don't find it that way.
>>>It's the way things are.
>>>Despite all the bumps in the road, we continue to progress technically using that model.
>>
>>Ha! Not so. The business owners are not technically skilled. The clients are not technically skilled. The owners and the clients couldn't tell a good programmer from a bad one if their lives depended on it.
>
>I don't think they're that clueless. Of course they can't evaluate code quality/elegance directly but they can look at things like how close it was to on time, number of reported bugs, user satisfaction, and the like.

User satisfaction? Let me tell you what I just saw. A bunch of companies using crappy software. A supplier keeping it running - by bailing out the users and all of them clueless. "It's good since it's working" is really what keeps things crappy.