Pragmatism is the most important aspect, in my opinion. Sometimes you need to write something that will need to be maintained by other people or by yourself in the somewhat distant future, in which case your coding practices are really important. Sometimes some logic is so complex that it needs to be expressed cleanly in order to be understood by other developers. Sometimes none of these things apply and it simply doesn't matter.
Personally, I try to keep my code as clean as I can, but I don't allow myself to obsess - or it becomes entirely unproductive.