You should see the recursive version for processing arbitrarially deep nested hashes :)

On a serious note. I find short to be good for mainatainence. It may require me to look longer before I start making changes, but I consider that a good thing.

Too many times I've been bitten by zeroing in on what looked to be (or the comments indicated as), a self contained piece of code, only to find out later that there was another piece just off screen that was affected.

It's a personal thing, but if I don't understand a piece of code froom reading it, then I prefer to experiment (in a test program or with the debugger) until I do, rather than be swayed into believing that I understand it by reading another programmer's, or even my own, comments.