Personally, I consider code I don't understand after reading it thrice a much worse code smell.
Less sarcastically: I think you're being too dogmatic. I don't like the idea of 'code smells', because it encourages you to judge code not by performance, maintainability, or readability, but by the property that someone has decided it's a code smell. Often it's true that the pattern can be used to write utterly shit code. Code smells are, IMHO, being used as a substitute for common sense. My common sense tells me that the first example is most clean solution. If the code keeps you from obtaining the performance you need, or if you add more checks in other places which make the code unreadable, by all means, refactor it.
Less sarcastically: I think you're being too dogmatic. I don't like the idea of 'code smells', because it encourages you to judge code not by performance, maintainability, or readability, but by the property that someone has decided it's a code smell. Often it's true that the pattern can be used to write utterly shit code. Code smells are, IMHO, being used as a substitute for common sense. My common sense tells me that the first example is most clean solution. If the code keeps you from obtaining the performance you need, or if you add more checks in other places which make the code unreadable, by all means, refactor it.