I appreciate this. I think one of the more valuable advice I was given re:conditionals is to make sure the positive path is the non-branching path. Branch your exception, let your expected path fall through.

    if ( unexpected = true )
      branch;
    do_expected_stuff

Caveat: ways to do things age. Maybe this is no longer true or even slightly advantageous, but so far it has served me.

I also prefer 20 lines of simple pedestrian code to 2 lines of clever code. I remind myself that I write for the maintainers, who do not have the benefit of my resident knowledge when they encounter the code.