The better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy.

This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 percent of the time resulting in... etc.

PS: Don't get me wrong the happy path works well most of the time and when it fails early it's just a non viable embryo so no problem. However, saying it's elegant is like saying all airplanes in the sky must be easy to maintain because you never see anyone outside fixing them.

Your code would evolve and maintain itself too, if you could afford to wait millions of years and let it randomly break for a large portion of your users.