The actual quote was something like "aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines" which proves your point a bit better.

It's actually a bit ironic, because I consider Ferrari to build elegant cars while my old V8 Dodge is a triumph of brute force and ignorance. They're both great cars at opposite ends of the spectrum :-)

A variation on the sentiment I heard in a movie: "turbochargers are for wussies, real cars have cubic inches!"

Elegant doesn't always go with optimized aerodynamics.

Well, I was using less horsepower.

The problem in the previous solution was that it took a while to keep the fancy datastructures updated. (It's a globally replicated distributed system..)