Your second paragraph said to make things shorter. Your third one says to take the "long way". So uh....... what?
English
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Cleaning it up and consolidating is different than literally shortening the code. Doing things the long way means actually going line by line to parse everything legibly and with notes to help visualize how it will affect other systems. This results in a more concise operation, or a "shorter" path, even though the method takes "longer". It's probably less intuitive of a sentence than I intended, but what I said is understandable to the right audience.