Oh yes, I'm with you, I hate it when people rate your work based on your lines of code. I read somewhere about a university project in delphi where they had to make an ascii tetris game. One group actually made a function for each different tile like that:

draw(" * ");
draw("***");

etc, and even individual draw functions for each rotation of the tile, and even further separate functions testing collision for each of the tile and rotation functions . Should this guy really get paid more than someone that took the extra five minutes to combine all this into one function using 10 lines?

I'm just expressing some frustration over people obsessed with too dense code, just so they can save one or two lines. I believe there's a balance you'll have to find that will work for you, and hopefully for others reading that code as well.

Let me give you another example. I see a lot of people use bitwise expressions so that they can use single-byte variables (f.e. a char) to store information for 8 different flags (true or false booleans). I'd rather use an array of 8 booleans to do this, to make the code more readable, even if C's booleans take 8 bits each. But that's just me..