I adore elegance, but over time have come to understand that edge cases tend to creep into those "leaky abstractions," and you can find yourself unraveling things, at least partially, in order to solve bugs.

There's no shame in this IMHO, and lots of very good programmers have to add inelegant shims to solve specific edge cases. I enjoyed reading this article (previously linked on HN by another) which I think has some relevance here: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/