I find that the older I grow as a programmer the less I enjoy cleverness. There's never a good enough reason to use clever algorithms over boring ones. In fact, most of the refactors I did over the past year was to 'undo' cleverness (thankfully those programmers are no longer working here!)

In terms of performance you sometimes need to do less conventional things, but that's precisely where documenting WHY you're doing it that way is so important.

The small bits of performance you're going to get isn't worth the maintenance hell it's going to cause.