Most businesses don't (and shouldn't) care about software for software's sake. But they do care about their software delivering value, and product and sales tea

Most businesses don't (and shouldn't) care about software for software's sake. But they do care about their software delivering value, and product and sales teams are very aware of the value that good software provides - and the costs of bad software - since they're the ones who have to drop feature ideas or turn away clients. Ironically, I've found that selling good software engineering practices to engineers can be much harder than selling it to other teams. Good software also doesn't take longer to get to market - I think on anything but the shortest of terms, building high quality software pays off immensely. You're saying two contradictory things here: that we can "design it so well that it will never fail, and it will scale effortlessly, and it will be easy to add new features indefinitely" but also that it takes 3-4 times longer to bring to market. If I can effortlessly build features, why do they take longer to get to market? I think a lot of software engineers believe that there is a trade-off between quality and efficiency, but I think that's the opposite of the truth: if you trade off quality, you are trading off long-term efficiency as well. Likewise an investment in quality is an investment in efficiency.