But it was the original asker that brought up aesthetics - apparently unaware that it has nothing to do with it - it’s not subjective (more generally the concepts of worth and value are not “entirely” subjective, that’s ridiculous) - there are strictly more things you can do with a PCB. You can’t design high speed and/or highly integrated designs with perfboard (unless you limit yourself to the few parts available on carrier boards).

The more layers, the easier to design IMO. You have to do more QC when placing a via, and there's more layers in general to flip between, but routing puzzles become easier.

I find having access to traces to cut and probe to be a lot more important for hobby projects (that usually don't go through a simulation first). Routing is a very simple exercise below RF. YMMV though, exact application and goal probably matters more for this discussion.