Comment by angrycoder

The problem with a lot of clever solutions is that they often obfuscate the code. This makes it harder for someone to figure out exactly what and how you are doing something. The clever solutions were necessary back then because cycles, memory, and storage were at a premium. Today they are mostly premature or unnecessary optimizations.

As an example, a few months ago a young developer I worked with implemented a set of attributes on a table as a bit field. He had just read an article about then and did it because it sounded cool. It made running reports against the data and doing imports via plain SQL impossible without writing a bunch of extra functions. His clever solution that saved about $0.0001 worth of disk ended up costing several hours of developer time because he didn't just a join table and a foreign key.