Is it normal to spend more time making the wiring look nice than making it work?

Reworking wiring that already works is about as common as it gets in this hobby. I once spent a whole evening redoing the guts of a simple amplifier I'd built, unsoldering half of it, because the ground wires crossed over each other in a way that looked like spaghetti. It sounded fine before, it sounded fine after, and I honestly can't tell you what I gained except sleep.

Yeah, I get it. It's less about the lamp looking pretty and more about the process itself. I've spent hours organizing the internal leads on a power supply unit for a neighbor, even though it was totally sealed up anyway. It just feels bad to leave a mess in something you've put togehter. You're making sure the whole thing is robust, not just functional. I guess when you're into this stuff, it's hard to see the difference between a good job and a sloppy one.

I think I understand the feeling more now. When I was putting together a little signal booster recently, I spent way too much time just lining up the mounting feet of the circuit board. They were all slightly off-center and I felt like I had to move the whole thing around untill they were perfectly straight. It didn't make the signal any better, but the finished setup looked much cleaner. Is it always about making the small stuff look right, or do you ever get stuck on the physical shape of the whole piece?

I totally get the itch for clean layouts. I had a similar experiance with a power supply recently. It wasn't until I bought some Kapton tape that I realized how much better the whole thing looked. It’s just a thin layer of shielding material that lets you secure and cover tiny wires without making a mess.

My initial setup was a tangle, but once I wrapped the leads in that tape, the internal components really popped. It felt like solving a small puzzle when the wires finally lay flat and tidy. Do you ever find that the organization helps you debug or trace signals better, or is it purely visual for you?