This is true, but i doubt it was just 10$ piece - they did many of these shortcuts that probably didn't matter. They probably didn't use the _best_ material on

This is true, but i doubt it was just 10$ piece - they did many of these shortcuts that probably didn't matter. They probably didn't use the _best_ material on your kitchen countertop, because the marginal value over good enough is not there. In a similar analogy to yours, most of these systems tend to cause outage somewhere, which are then usually patched on the fly. Depending on a project, shipping fast is usually more valuable than not shipping it for a year. From my pov, i used to be in advertising, and not releasing a billion dollar feature for a year would, by definition, cost a billion dollars a year. If it explodes after releasing, you are still better of by a huge marging because outage would cost much less. Once you have the business going, you can spend money and manpower on the problem, too. I think this is key: "Hard way not being harder". This depends. Engineers like to overengineer, and without proper supervision they tend to favor technical excellence over business usecase - it needs to be a balance. On the house example, i bet the value of your house still increased, and the 1500$ you paid is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Just like business & rewrite. Overall, don't get me wrong, I like to use my best skills and put a shiny design out, but i don't do it because I favor doing "good enough".