... no one has to go back and try to debug Liszt's original score.

A fair point: there's a craft to programming, one which becomes more obvious when someone has to maintain that code. No one has to figure out the dominant tonality of Tristan und Isolde.

Then again, the nice part of working in a craft—especially one both malleable and empirical as programming—is that you can turn something from a spectacular mess into something maintainable.