worse (still) is better

Spring-Watching Pavilion
A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by worldly dust.
Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside clown in sad puddles.
Love's vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.
-from the Vietnamese of Ho Xuan Huong

[...]

For example, network TV is flooded with adolescent humor, sex, and violence because these are the most basic drives people have, while an interest in Vietnamese poetry - which is a very refined poetry - is quite rare. We call this the intersection effect.
The phenomenon of worse is better occurs even within a relatively esoteric sub-field like object- oriented programming and programming languages.

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two quotes from the

Back to the future (panel session): Is worse (still) better?

from the
Addendum to the 2000 proceedings of the conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications