Does that really look better to you? More understandable? Methods with the word &quot;and&quot; in them are really awful smells to me too.<p>Comparing your code and mine, I ask you this: which one do you thing is more maintainable after 5 years of edits?<p>Each time a new developer needs to add a new case, a new rule, a new whatever, on my Optional (ab)usage, they just add a new line in the appropriate spot, a .filter or a .map or whatever. In yours it&#x27;s far less clear.<p>Optional, for me, is wonderful because it lets me have a single return statement. A lot of the code in Java I&#x27;m replacing with this pattern is the stuff that has 5 different returns after checks. Crusty old stuff, but the business logic it&#x27;s running has grown the way it has for good reasons.