Walking through 100k lines of code I've never seen before - I feel the denser the code the harder to grok. Code needs to be concise, not short. But that's just my opinion.
Okay, but think about what you're comparing. Other things equal, 100 kloc of dense code is harder to understand than 100 kloc of verbose code, naturally. But that's not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is maybe 50 kloc of dense code to 100 kloc of verbose code.
