The counterargument is that it would have taken so long to do it the "right" way that someone else would have shipped the simpler implementation and it would be

The counterargument is that it would have taken so long to do it the "right" way that someone else would have shipped the simpler implementation and it would be widely adopted by users that were happy to have something "good enough" so by the time your "right solution" shipped they wouldn't care about it anymore. I mean, TTY was first written in the 70s. If I write code works fine except that it has a bug that will require a rewrite from scratch in 40 years I'd be pretty happy with the quality.