Speaking of good "taste" you could apply your "taste" to what are worthy tests and what are not (ie adding just maintenance). The fact of the matter is you need some sort of testing to happen or some sort of proof that your code works on a continuous basis and if you don't have that to happen IMO I'm not going to say it is good code particularly when it is based solely on one persons opinion of what is good looking code. Aesthetics compared to performance, readability and automated testing are pretty low on my list. You may say aesthetics brings those characteristics and it might but lets have some tests to prove it.

As for maintenance and test code being invalid it doesn't have to be as buggy and in fact can be even in done in a data driven style or declaratively. Besides if it is a true unit test you should have written the test. If its your code and you have such good "taste" shouldn't it not "break down into a mess"?

There are plenty of projects like SQL Lite, and jQuery that have excellent "taste" not just because of the quality of code but because of the test coverage. Oh and I won't go downvote people who disagree (which my parent seems to be) because I hold that to be poor in "taste" IMO.