I am totally in the simple, but longer camp. There's absolutely no benefit from being overly clever about your implementations. It's just going to take you 10x longer down the road to figure out how to debug the damn thing.

My first programming job was a shop where we actually wrote reference code that would be implemented by other companies into various chipsets. There was no room for lack of clarity there. Everything, absolutely everything, must be crystal clear. I've taken many of the things I've learned there to all my other programming projects.