On the 2600 if it saved you a byte or two it was a big win. Remember your program had to fit in 64 bytes of memory. Not kilobytes, single bytes. And your numbers are BCD encoded, so they're extra inefficient.
If expressing a conditional costs you more than 1/64 of your storage I'd say the storage is pretty useless for storing code.
Nobody has ever accused Atari Basic of being good.