In some ways they converge, in some ways not. On some level "nice to look at" means everything conveys some meaning, and nothing is obviously awkward. "Easy to understand" means everything you might need to know is on the screen. Those things are often aligned, but sometimes orthogonal.

Put another way, you can make something that looks simple and pleasing, but hides a lot of complexity that's required to understand in order to be able to do your work.

>I find "nice to look at" and "easier to understand" tend to converge over time. Elixir pushes me to expand my mental maps a bit more than Go, but once I grok it the code reads much more coherently and concisely.

Sounds like something that won't hold up as well over time.