I'm sure that I'm going to be caught out for mis-remembering this... but I recall something from Richard Feynman's auto-biography where he's describing a piece

I'm sure that I'm going to be caught out for mis-remembering this... but I recall something from Richard Feynman's auto-biography where he's describing a piece of advice from when he was working on a mechanical analog computer (for ack-ack aiming) you pick the gears from nearer the middle of the range if you possibly can. I've worked on projects that were burned by incorporating too many bleeding edge components, when things are too new, you often don't know what you don't know. I'm sure if I had this list to point to on my last project, I'd either have been shown the door sooner, or we might have had a better chance of success...