The real world is often messy, and solutions that work in it are often messy. The best you can hope for is that someone uses a lookup table/config file instead of a tangled nest of hard-coded "if" statements. But seeking elegant algorithms to address real world problems is often a wild goose chase.
No one's looking for elegant algorithms for real world problems here.
The reality is that most real-world problems are not particularly complicated, yet most have exceedingly complicated solutions, and as a result, disproportionately large maintenance overhead -- and that maintenance is largely code archeology (wow, what idiot came up with this bit dumbass approach? Why does this framework require 6 new classes in order to add a simple pair of pages to the site?), not productive time.
