Imo, this is silly and condescending. I've worked with plenty of team leads and PMs who understand the value of refactoring at some level. In your analogy, I w

Imo, this is silly and condescending. I've worked with plenty of team leads and PMs who understand the value of refactoring at some level. In your analogy, I would say the implementation details would be things like which wrench is used, which hand turns the wrench, how many turns it takes to loosen/tighten something, exactly how you hold the bottle of widget fluid to pour it into the right widget fluid opening under the hood, etc. The concept of which widgets are being fixed seems crucial to the full picture of understanding the state change of the system (car) before and after the work is done. The owner is paying for the state change in the system.