I've kind of gone the other way. I used to spend a lot more time making my research code elegant, extensible, and modular.

But I realized that I rarely benefitted from it, since the requirements of different projects are often so different.

So I'm much more comfortable slapping together code that just gets the job done now. For my research work, at least.

If you detail your frustrations or questions in a post, you might be so lucky.