Finally, a pet peeve that I find frequently in poorly edited tutorials: the desire to show off the language by presenting clever tricks or small hacks it can accomplish.

Is anyone adept at scanning the whole code base, looking for pervasive issues or opportunities? Are less expensive tweaks and hacks preferable over doing it right (but expensively) the first time?

It won't take you all the way to your goal by itself, but combined with other motivation hacks, it can be a very useful tool.