> I think the reason for this is because developers who focus on development speed do so at the expense of succinctness. The more foresight you have when you're

> I think the reason for this is because developers who focus on development speed do so at the expense of succinctness. The more foresight you have when you're writing code, the fewer lines you will end up with. Not necessarily. 1. The process you describe works pretty well for code you wrote yourself. However, once the original developers are gone, any understanding, foresight and future plans they had (beyond the coarsest, most high level ones) basically got burned in a fire. That means a lot of minimum-effort jiu-jitsu solutions aren't available anymore, and you'll have a lot more kludges and re-implementations of things that may already be there (but forgotten). 2. Few developers have the luxury of infinite time, and succinct code is rarely a business priority. That means you pretty much never can go all-in for succinctness, which would frequently require large scale refactors to achieve. The end result is that, inevitably, over time, features and bug fixes will get grafted onto foundations that weren't ever meant to support them.