You're correct when you say about YAGNI not necessarily leading to "elegant, short, and easy to maintain code". That is, in the end, up to the developer's skill.
YAGNI is not about being lazy, it's about being smart about the code being written, about the craft.
Over-engineering, architecture astronauts, hurt a system a lot more than someone following YAGNI. Making systems that are a big mess of hard to understand and modify code (even worse). I've seen this happen again and again.
Architects sitting in ivory towers pump out Word documents which result in overly complicated systems. Large, slow, waste people's time and money. The whole idea of "oh, in 10 years we may want to handle this and that" adds unecessary code which then needs to be tested and creates many more points of failure. And did I mention slow? These hairy-balled monstrosities are terribly sow.
If over-engirneers got paid by the line of code, they'd be millionaires. If they got paid for writing elegant, short and easy to maintain code, then they wouldn't have two pennies to rub together -- the YAGNI developer would be sitting in his yacht.
If you hang out on github, and do your social coding over there (or simply prefer git over Mercurial), here is a github fork of the repository: https://github.com/dbarros/dapper-dot-net
A Java developer complaining about Ruby's supposed verbosity? What's the world coming to?! When one looks at Java code, 90% of it is just syntactic sugar, which doesn't add much to the actual working code. One has to filter through large amounts of white noise to get to the crux of the code. Not so with Ruby (and many other languages).