Mediocre game technology

I once heard that elegant code is in some respect contradictory to useful software, because it's often the sum of all exceptions that make a program useful, rather than it being strictly logical. Do you remember the frustration back when the javascript of slow-loading web pages was allowed to switch input focus to a login input box while you were typing a URL? The software was just following it's strict logic, switching input when it was told, while the better way of handling it would be a not-so-elegant check if the user have manually focused something else in between the start loading and finished loading, or a timer checking if the input focus change is still relevant. I wouldn't say that this contradiction applies to all aspects of software development, but certainly to most parts that interface with people. In a game, the most common part of the code that interface with people, apart from the GUI, is caracter controllers. One would think that modeling a character