What are some characteristics of a well engineered network?

I love the Zen of Python and think it's a pithy summary of what makes great code. What would this look like if we translated for the network? Obviously, a bunch of this is great advice without any translation needed, but is there any network-specific principles that separates good engineering from mediocre?

The Zen

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! 

Edit: trimmed for clarity.