Recently I had to decide on merit salary increases. One of the toughest decisions came down to a couple of folks that I'll call Yin and Yang.
Yang is an expert developer, technically brilliant, always has a clever answer to a problem.
Yin is dependable, reliable, always gets the job done. I can always count on Yin to cheerfully accept and complete any task.
But...
Yang's hubris sometimes causes careless mistakes. Yang is also high maintenance, frequently requiring meetings to discuss the most minute of details and risks. Yang requires a surprising amount of micromanagement to ensure that assignments stay on track, and don't veer off into the realm of overarchitecture.
Yin stopped learning new things years ago. Yin gets the job done through brute force.
Ultimately I ruled in favor of Yin. Both developers adequately complete their tasks but take different approaches. Both are important parts of the team. I went with the person who made my life easiest. Though Yang's solutions are technically superior to Yin's, at the end of the day the user doesn't care about elegant code- users just want their applications to work.
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sounds like you made the right choice - in the end, a great attitude and focus on results makes the whole team better. As long as those 'brute force' solutions don't create more problems than they solve, they can be refactored later. Chances are, the problem with change in the meantime anyway ...
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