Am I playing it too safe with multiple helper columns instead of one complex formula?

Hi everyone!

I'm a teacher from PH. I started building an Excel system to automate the heavy paperwork we face esp during the EOSY (End of School Year). What began as a "lazy" way to handle my own tasks turned into a tool I shared with three coworkers. From there, I dove into books and YouTube, eventually building a system using basic VBA and complex formulas that my entire school now uses. I'm proud to say it turned weeks of work into just one hour... and since it's summer here, I'm revamping the whole thing to make it available for Mac users while still being limited to Excel 2019 and older (as most teachers don't have the latest ones). I'm proud of the progress but at the moment, I am feeling self-doubt.

Just earlier, I decided to lean heavily into using helper columns that my main sheets can reference to. I have quite a few, but each one has a clear, single responsibility. This makes the logic easier for me to follow and debug later. Plus there's a lot to consider really and although I know I could compress a lot of this into fewer, more complex formulas (or even one large formula) but I find this approach much easier to maintain. It's a bit like organizing my own room... I prefer to set things up in a way that I understand so I always know where to look if something goes wrong. That said, I’ve started second-guessing myself while looking at how many helper columns I’m using. Am I playing it too safe (I mean this in a negative way) knowing there are better ways to do it?

My question is: In a huge system like this, do you prefer breaking logic into multiple helper columns for clarity, or consolidating everything into fewer, more complex formulas?

(I admit I might just be overthinking it (maybe a bit of imposter syndrome kicking in, comparing myself to how others will probably do the same work I'm doing), but I’d really appreciate hearing how others approach this.)