Oh, I certainly agree. I have different projects with different goals. I've spent some time eking out every ounce of performance for a Newton-Rhapson division routine in assembly. But then there are some high level things that I think lead to more elegant (and ultimately simpler) programming. Clojure for example isn't particularly close to the hardware, but it leads to better coding practices that result in easier long term maintenance, less bugs, etc.

I think a good balance would be to take a well designed language and add an option for high-performance code when needed. C and C++ do this with inline assembly (although I don't know that anyone would call C "elegant"). It would be nice if more higher-level languages added this ability.