I agree. Along with what you said in your first paragraph, I've found that the times that I've completely lost all my work on a project and had to rewrite it f

I agree. Along with what you said in your first paragraph, I've found that the times that I've completely lost all my work on a project and had to rewrite it from scratch, the second "draft" was far superior and easier to write than the first; mostly because I had already weeded out all of the bad assumptions. However, I doubt this is feasible for anything larger than a fairly simple one-man weekend project; for exactly the reasons you mention.