How can you say it was good when you went ahead and then said you zip tied things?
This may seem contradictory to you, but I assure you, to a normal person it is not.
You see, I keep my chassis closed at all times, I do not see the cables inside the box. Therefore, some ziptied bunches do not concern, nor bother me...
Good wiring means you cant see the wiring.
No, that's GEEKY wiring you're thinking of. There's absolutely no merit whatsoever to hiding away all the wires inside the case, it makes no difference where cooling is concerned. Besides, hardly any cases are built with such facilities (nor do power supplies typically come with leads long enough to stick 'em behind the back plate, etc).
and you do not use round cables (they're terrible).
Was nothing wrong at all with the cheap ones I used. Well, except that the particular set I bought did not support the cable select. feature, so I had to manually jumper my drives for master/slave. I ran them at ATA100 speed, never had any issues whatsoever with them despite heavy use for 2+ years.
A good case and design allows you to put the cables where you can not even see them.
Makes for quite a bother if you need to change anything. I can't imagine having to rip out all my expansion cards and the mobo just because I managed to pull off one of the ATA connectors from the ribbon, gyeesh. I can think of at least 500 better ways of spending those 30+ minutes.