One can always argue either way, depending on individual preferences as well.
If you love something, why do differently? I'd argue you shouldn't!
Fewer bugs, initiates create'em just because "new to the tool and thinking logically". An experienced programmer can pick up a new language she likes, and program it almost flawlessly after compiling and learning basic syntax / libraries. Won't be utilizing language's best strengths, but may be productive enough. Creating software with trivial bugs makes testing and trust easier and faster.
Fewer lines, although a bad measurement of complexity, is the simplest path to fewer bugs. Clarity is superior, but requires ancient experience, skill and hard to measure and prove. Reusing others' code lead to lesser of your own lines, but is a dependency-nightmare tradeoff, so depends on future maintenance needs and lifecycle. Of course it doesn't make sense to sacrifice readability for too few lines or too long lines!
Someone elite knows many tools, and whenever possible, avoids having to program much at all. A crude shell-script or Excel-sheet may be just enough for that use case, which can be further evolved later. A prototype requires much less than a fully functional solution. A public service require much more than a local process. Generally, you want to do less but still meet needs (requirements). The elite avoids what doesn't need to be done, and isn't shy to walk away from silly endeavours (prioritization).
The automation-part is easy, any decent programmer can do it and quickly weed out technical bugs (a few months). A novice could find it hard and get stuck. Whatever is left to do, can be done when it's needed, so doesn't make sense to time.
However, what's hard is finding edge and weed out logical inconsistencies (logical bugs?). It requires properly defining processes of backtesting, strategy validation and how to integrate the final logic into a cohesive system. This is the same type of problem wether you're discretionary or systematic, but for automation, you can't always rely on manual intervention to save your account should the system do the wrong decisions or have poor execution. With discretion, there's more manual intervention and less work on logic, so relying more on wetware than hardware.
So I think everyone is right to some degree, just have different approaches and then whatever someone else do looks like madness!
