This feels very much to me like architecture astronaut behavior. This overwhelming drive to pull "elegance" out of everything mundane or tediously complicated.
Yes, you can sometimes rewrite your algorithm to eliminate "special cases", but if you do it at the cost of comprehensibility, it's not a net gain. In the case of these examples, we're not really even talking about "special cases", but edge cases, where you literally need to deal with an edge in the data. In the case of the neighbor sums, edge cases were masked by padding. In the case of the staircase, the edge is just obfuscated by the doubled labels and then hidden in a modulo operation. These are totally fine except that they seem to provide no value except "elegance", and they come at a high cost in terms of understandability. (The first step is literally "transform to a different problem", so now you need to understand the original problem as well as the new problem, and how they relate.)
I'm all for elegance when it comes bundled with understandability or legibility or performance or even simplicity. But often it actually means "clever" and it's an extremely subjective measure that delivers little to no value and is prone to causing problems later.
Yes, you can sometimes rewrite your algorithm to eliminate "special cases", but if you do it at the cost of comprehensibility, it's not a net gain. In the case of these examples, we're not really even talking about "special cases", but edge cases, where you literally need to deal with an edge in the data. In the case of the neighbor sums, edge cases were masked by padding. In the case of the staircase, the edge is just obfuscated by the doubled labels and then hidden in a modulo operation. These are totally fine except that they seem to provide no value except "elegance", and they come at a high cost in terms of understandability. (The first step is literally "transform to a different problem", so now you need to understand the original problem as well as the new problem, and how they relate.)
I'm all for elegance when it comes bundled with understandability or legibility or performance or even simplicity. But often it actually means "clever" and it's an extremely subjective measure that delivers little to no value and is prone to causing problems later.