Pretty link vs Messy link

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Alan Bleiweiss: Opinion: That is a painful URL that breaks core web functionality logic. the ".php" is meant to indicate "this is an end point URL. Typically, the only proper additional syntax after that, is non-permalink URL parameters or anchor references. So for example "index.php?parameterX=pagename" or "index.php#MiddleOfThePageAnchor" - to butcher that and force a "permalink" type pagename on the end of it, without a URL parameter, breaks that model. And while they may be able to "get away with it", anything that`s done that breaks the expected behavior model, forces search crawlers, search indexers and search algorithms to work overtime to have to "figure it all out". For sustainable SEO reasons, we never want to cause any unnecessary friction for those systems if at all possible. Because those systems are imperfect at best, and using non-traditional methodology risks causing confusion in formula and algorithym processes.
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  Richard Hearne: Agree with all the above, but I`ll moderate this by saying that any URL change is going to generate some pain. So you may not want to migrate this just for the sake of it. If there are other changes to AI or significant page template updates then you might be able to roll the URL change in with those, but I`m not sure I`d go changing it just to get pretty URLs. Depends also on how fragile or otherwise the site is - if they have low search visibility to start with then they may have little to lose, but if they generate a lot of organic traffic with current URL pattern then you might want to let a sleeping dog lie...
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  Kim Pittoors: Let me guess: It`s Joomla 😉 The dev just needs to make a change to the .htaccess file and change a setting in the global configuration. Easy as pie 😂
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  Neil Cheesman: Not disagreeing with the above at all but there appear to be quite a few instances of this online...