@Shea and Andy,

Yep. Your both right. Hard coding changes in the core code is not ideal. I rarely do it myself and even more rarely suggest that anyone else do it. And yes, plugins are handier, in so many ways.

All that said, there are times when hard coding may be the way to go to accomplish something you want to accomplish. At least temporarily. I used to have a lot of hard coded hacks on danemorgan.com, but I have only a handful there now, and most of those, only because I haven't taken the time to remove them.

I really liked this particular example though because it demonstrates a couple of things.

First, it's simple. I removed three words and added two slashes to accomplish what would require several lines of plugin code. This shows that it's a doable thing and you could even use a macro in a good text editor to make these changes in future updates very easily.

Second it calls attention to the fact that all of these plugins do come at a cost. For some of us the cost is negligible, but for some others the cost means they have to choose between functionality on their blog and making major changes to their hosting and operations. There are probably a lot of things that could be done both by Automattic and by plugin authors that would reduce this cost, but the focus almost always seems to ignore those who can't afford the cost so easily.

I can't say that I see a problem with any particular dofollow plugin causing server strain, but I can see theoretically where it could given enough traffic and enough comments.