That's an excellent question, and you've already received a few good responses, but here's my view :) The answer to your second and third questions are both "y

That's an excellent question, and you've already received a few good responses, but here's my view :) The answer to your second and third questions are both "yes." A lot of developers take pride in building complex software. Bad developers do it because they just shut up and code, and turn software that should be simple into a giant pile of fragile spaghetti code. That leads to a high maintenance overhead, so adding features becomes a lot more labor intensive than it would be with a good piece of software... hence higher cost.