My only real concern with this essay is that the OP bothered to refactor out the duplication, but didn't bother to refactor his internal refactoring when it got too complicated, instead claiming: "look, now it got messy", threw up his arms, and said there's nothing more that can be done, blaming DRY as the culprit.

Except we CAN do something about it.

It would have been just as easy to continue refactoring the tweet_list() method to pull filtering, pagination, and profanity checking out into sub methods-- at which point you've built a strong reusable component that can support many more combinations of those extra requirements. So by the time you get more feedback saying, "we need a new page that only shows 5 tweets per page and hides profanity, but does not filter", you can now easily take that reusable component, pass in those options and be done rather than starting from the top because you refused to clean up your internals. That's why we strive for reusable components in the first place.

In other words, if the argument is that refactored code is messy, it really means you aren't done refactoring.