One viewpoint quantifies the worth of a system by actual or expected Quality, Parsimony and Beauty. Quality in the Phil Crosby sense as "conformance to requirements." Parsimony meaning no sufficient alternative requires less goods in the economic and ecologic sense. Beauty, in the sense of Gelertner's Machine Beauty, Basic Books, 1998.   

Now comes news in  the August proceedings of ACM's SIGGRAPH, The Sum of Your Facial Parts,
that a focus group of men and women selected the most attractive faces from a sample set then researchers at Tel Aviv University distilled 234 significant measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, and between the eyes. They devised an algorithm that altered an image according to agreed-upon standards of attractiveness while producing a result that left the face completely recognizable.  

Can we similarly devise a list of significant measurements for improving system architectures, functional designs, or object classes? If so, we could engage software agents to adjust, adapt and co-align our designs.