Yeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I replace

Yeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I replaced an old ColdFusion app with a few pages of PHP backed by MySQL. The design was horrendous, the error handling worse, and yet somehow it was an incredible leap forward in terms of performance and UX. I think the bottom line is that there is often very juicy low hanging fruit that you can get to just by a minimal amount of knowledge and sheer force of will. The deeper knowledge and experience will give you a lot more things to think about which will help with edge cases, scalability, maintainability, robustness, etc; but while those things may be necessary for some projects, in many cases they end up bringing only small marginal gains. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm actively cultivating beginner's mind to avoid being paralyzed by my knowledge of all the ways things can go wrong.