I feel your pain - I struggle with the same thing. But I think it's possible, to some extent, to have the best of both worlds. An ideal of clean, logical desig

I feel your pain - I struggle with the same thing. But I think it's possible, to some extent, to have the best of both worlds. An ideal of clean, logical design actually satisfies both #1 and #2. You don't write any more than you need to, but you architect it sensibly so if you need to modify it in the future, there's a natural way to do it. A case study: you are responsible for maintaining a moderately sized mailing list. Type 1: Maintains a comma+newline separated list of name/email pairs in a text file, parse it with a 3 line perl script that sends an email for each regex match. Done in 15 minutes. YAGN anything else. Type 2: Builds a fully relational model in a database with seperate tables for names and addresses, backed by Hibernate with a complete class hierarchy including AbstractRecords (in case you want to store records other than name/email pairs), RecordFactories (In case we need to generate lists of records from another source), AbstractRecordDAO (in case we need to use a different Database or ORM framework), EmailFactories, AbstractMailerImpl, etc, etc, etc, planning in the architecture for anything anyone might ever want to do with a mailing list. Both of these are wrong, IMO. The correct solution is to write one database table, or one cleanly formatted file, with a program with perhaps two classes that abstract apart the data loading and the mailing tasks. One class loads the data into a simple Map structure, and the other that handles iterating the map and doing the mailing. It only takes a bit longer to write than #1, and is infinitely simpler than #2. It doesn't anticipate every future need, but when one comes, there's a logical point to start adding the functionality. If I have to do something new with the list, I don't have to completely rewrite my program (like #1 does), I just write a new class that uses the existing data structure. Just as extensible as #2, with a tenth of the work. And easy to see what's going on.