The problem is that few projects survive long enough to get to the point where anyone can be annoyed by the lack of foresight... so often any foresight or effor

The problem is that few projects survive long enough to get to the point where anyone can be annoyed by the lack of foresight... so often any foresight or effort on implementing what was foreseen is wasted effort. Often times that wasted effort contributes to the premature death of the project by soaking up resources that could've been used to implement more features, fix more bugs, etc. The question is which is more problematic, the lack of foreseeing the need to change the database or the lack of foreseeing the death of the project due to spending time on the wrong things? Personally I think having a successful project that needs the database changed is a) not a particularly hard problem to deal with and b) a good problem to have.