I was just mulling this over today. DRY = easier-to-decode is probably true if you're working on groking the system at large. If you just want to peak in at something specific quickly, DRY code can be painful.

I wanted to see what compile flags were used by guix when compiling emacs. `guix edit emacs-next` brings up a file with nested definitions on top of the base package. I had to trust my working memory to unnest the definitions and track which compile flags are being added or removed. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

It'd be more error prone to have each package using redundant base information, but I would have decoded what I was after a lot faster.

Separately, there was a bug in some software aggregating cifti file values into tab separated values. But because any cifti->tsv conversion was generalized, it was too opaque for me to identify and patch myself as a drive-by contributor. https://github.com/PennLINC/xcp_d/issues/1170 to https://github.com/PennLINC/xcp_d/pull/1175/files#diff-76920...