Many others have mentioned the problem with estimating time cost. I think the core issue is that very few things actually take _only_ an afternoon of programmin

Many others have mentioned the problem with estimating time cost. I think the core issue is that very few things actually take _only_ an afternoon of programming to build. One good example of this is a general application framework like Dropwizard or Spring. These are relatively giant dependencies; and you could fairly easily do without them early-on in a project (or maybe for the life of a project). But, odds are, you'll spend an afternoon (or several) in the future refactoring to use such a framework, because xyz feature would benefit from that foundation. The judgement call of using it early or late is why we get paid the big bucks!