I don't want to make any comments regarding efficiency. Rather, I want to take on the elegance factor. I have a couple of 200+ liners doing, I believe, a nice job, but whenever I look at them, I want to throw up.

Half a dozen, maybe more nested loops,iterators all over, and gazillions of conditionals, together looking at me to with all their ugliness.

And they are carrying out such a fragile and complicated task that even the idea of a small addition paralyses me with horror.

Thank you tilly! I was expecting a push from someone to deal with this problem. I'm going to reconsider the design, and divide the subroutines.