A lot of "developer brilliance" is simply avoiding the inevitable slowdown that happens when projects mire themselves in technical debt. I've worked on plenty

A lot of "developer brilliance" is simply avoiding the inevitable slowdown that happens when projects mire themselves in technical debt. I've worked on plenty of projects where two smart developers would have massively outperformed the 10-12 mediocre and highly risk-averse developers working on the shitty (gradually getting shittier) code base over a period of 6 months. For greenfield I don't think 10x productivity is likely though. If you're testing an idea you might throw away, cheap and cheerful will do.