It's true. And, the sweat-hours poured into doing things "manually" might all be wasted once you automate. Worse, you might literally doom your project -- once

It's true. And, the sweat-hours poured into doing things "manually" might all be wasted once you automate. Worse, you might literally doom your project -- once you're doing things the "painful, manual" way for too long, the effort required to correct course might be too great for the project to survive. And yet... I still think simplicity is worth striving for. "Manual till it hurts", radical simplicity, YAGNI, etc. All of it. There are paths to failure there, but there are plenty of paths to failure when we overcomplicate/overautomate from the start too.