Stumbled upon a post by Marco Tabini titled: The importance of bad code (or, WordPress and why I am a psychic)
While I’m not sure where the psychic part comes in, his argument in favor of tolerating bad (ugly) code was pretty good. Essentially he states that projects that have lots of bad code in them (particularly in the open source community) is a good thing. It generally indicates that the expertise level required to contribute to the project is low, and that many people are contributing.
If you have a few minutes I highly recommend reading the full post and the first couple of comments.