Yeah ok. I'll buy most of that. I'm going to merge the values into a list, since there isn't really any need for multiple hashes like that, and the values need to resolve at the same point in the code. (It's not like there's any semantic difference in the usage at all.)

The problem about elegance (or, more importantly: simplicity) is that this is the beginning of a code base that's going to be expanding rather a lot. I can see the additional exception logic and strange additional conditions coming in to pollute this, so I'm trying to nip it in the bud.

But then I'm almost certainly playing "Premature Optimization" games.