There are a few things wrong here. Businesses do often (usually) care how many hours you spend patching "buggy, shit systems". Because programmers are expensiv

There are a few things wrong here. Businesses do often (usually) care how many hours you spend patching "buggy, shit systems". Because programmers are expensive. Obviously. They do not care about meeting arbitrary, irrelevant standards, like extensibility for features they will never need. Because that's expensive, obviously. Meeting arbitrary unneeded goals even takes a toll on actually relevant goals, like being able to adapt software quickly. I don't understand how you think this would not be a worthwhile goal. > design it so well that it will never fail Too much black and white thinking. Most problem domains don't need "will never fail", but are ok with "fails only seldom". And meeting "will never fail" is extremely expensive, obviously. > So I guess we have to leave the good architecture to the firms where it is critical: NASA, medical devices, avionics, etc. A good architecture is one that helps towards actual goals. And that's not extreme extensibility or extreme correctness, in most cases. For a concrete example, think about a game engine. It will not meet most arbitrary goals you could make up (it will fail, sometimes, and it can't make your coffee). But still I hope you can agree that there are many really well architected game engines.