Each person has their own strengths, but a worthwhile team member should be able to meet minimum requirements of readability and comments. This can be enforced through team agreements and peer review.

Your second point is really the crux of business in a lot of ways. The balance of quality versus quantity. Cost versus value. Long-term versus short term gains. I’m sure there are situations where ruthlessly prioritizing short term profit through low cost code is indeed the optimal solution. For those of us who love to craft high-quality code, the trick is finding the companies where it is understood and agreed that long-term value from high-quality code is worth the upfront investment and, more importantly, where they have the cash to make that investment.

>I’m sure there are situations where ruthlessly prioritizing short term profit through low cost code is indeed the optimal solution

This is mostly how large publicly traded corps work, unless they are ran by programmers that want great applications or are required by law, they tend to write a lot of crap.

>In addition companies don't seem to give a shit about straightforward code, they want LOC per day and the cheapest price possible which leads to tons of crap code.

Companies don't care about LOC, they care about solving problems. 30 LOC or 30k LOC doesn't matter much MOST of the time. They're just after a solution that puts the problem to rest.