Maintenance and robustness matter as well. You not only need to deliver a product, but you need to ensure that it does what it's supposed to as much as possible

Maintenance and robustness matter as well. You not only need to deliver a product, but you need to ensure that it does what it's supposed to as much as possible, and fix it if it breaks. Most products--particularly successful ones--take a lot more effort to maintain (both in fixing bugs and adding features long after the initial release) than to publish. You want to minimize the amount of effort needed to add features or fix bugs; a good way to do this is to have shorter, more elegant code. Additionally, plenty of fields require very robust code. If all you do is share pictures of cats a server held together by Perl and prayer is more than good enough. If you're investing large sums of money based on computer models, you better not have any errors. There is a reason why banks are some of the main users of Haskell. So: releasing is only part of the game. In certain cases valuing a faster turn-around is more important than code quality; in others, the cost of maintaining a poor code base far outlives the advantage of releasing early. However, there is another problem with this article: elegant code and "focusing on the application" are not mutually exclusive. If anything, writing elegant code will probably save you time, let you reuse more code and spend less time debugging.