It depends. How much the scope and vision of a project will vary in 2-5 years and 5+ years will vary greatly depending on the project. A small internal app for

It depends. How much the scope and vision of a project will vary in 2-5 years and 5+ years will vary greatly depending on the project. A small internal app for an institution or business probably should be far more cautious and simplistic than a consumer program designed to scale out as the business grows and customer needs change. Fit for purpose seems to be the idea that the author is conveying for an end-user level, and I feel that's something that gets lost in Slack chats/at the conference table whiteboard when designing things. A program that just does what it's supposed to isn't really lacking features, it's just doing what it should. I've seen this countless times with project management just hitting feature bloat after the initial part got to the "works somewhat reliably" stage, and suddenly it's time for the feature set to expand for some reason. In the projects I was dealing with, it happened as people tried to satisfy their egos and to show off; this isn't always the reason, but it's a reason. Other times I'd assume it's just a neat feature that someone wants to work on but has no where else to put it. I think it's just important from the get-go to determine do you really need software that evolves or do you need software that works really well at what it's supposed to do. I'm sure you can do both, but at a certain point it seems like these two directions start to pull too far away from each other.