Incidentally, I'm from the opposite school and consider every “if” followed by a braced block a smell.
If a conditional body needs a block, it's doing enough to deserve a name, so I promote it to a single named call, à la "Extract till you drop".
Another phrase for this is "functional decomposition", which usually is a good thing.
Better yet is to identify conditional execution paths as early as possible in order to obviate conditionals in the call tree. For example, identifying a "create a new something" verses an "update an existing something" based on the workflow initially invoked greatly simplifies service and/or persistent store logic.
