[billllll]

Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience).

Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.

In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.