> it turns out, its mostly not very controversial
I don't believe this until proven otherwise with actual data. Any programming concept on this planet eventually gets an article on the HN front page that argues for why that particular concept is really bad and then we are having a huge discussion about it.
I don't remember the last time that a piece by Uncle Bob or Martin Fowler—and they're just two examples, I've seen quite a few more who are generally met with agreement every time they're posted—was heavily criticized or disagreed with here.
And when I do see disagreements, they tend to come from people who don't seem to have nearly as much experience as those guys do or who might have misinterpreted their point (much like how the idea of agile has turned into something that only reflects the manifesto tangentially, and accidentally at that) and who are, perhaps not coincidentally, likely to fall in the "programming is easy" camp.
And even then, "controversial in hacker news" is hardly representative of what's controversial in the field at large (which I also understand goes against my own first point).
I'd recommend you check out Code Complete if you haven't read it. It is an excellent intro into best practices although its about 1000 pages and a bit dated. As it turns out, we as an industry do have an understanding of what makes code better, and it turns out, its mostly not very controversial - push complexity as low as it can go, simpler interfaces tend to be better, argument pass through causes errors, functions longer than 80 lines are associated with higher error counts, optimize code for human comprehension later (~70% of the effort that goes into code is maintaining it) etc etc.