polish

sometimes things can be too polished...like a speaker who knows all the right gestures to make and all the right places to pause. it's ok to be polished when your performance is absolutely sublime - like I think of some of the figure skating performances in the winter olympics where the skater achieves a kind of perfection ^ their performance is flawless. 

but when you're doing something more ordinary, rather than the performance of a lifetime (or one of the performances of your lifetime) the polish can seem like complacence. 

there's a similar thing with rock bands. sometimes the rougher and rawer sounding band is just better than the more polished one.