The world is more complex than that. Sometimes there is a hard deadline (those do exist for a large number of completely legitimate reasons) and even though the

The world is more complex than that. Sometimes there is a hard deadline (those do exist for a large number of completely legitimate reasons) and even though the "must have"s are done and dusted, you know you won't have the opportunity to launch/go to print/present again for a good while, so you cram to really, really make the product shine and impress (any mildly intelligent and creative person who enjoys what they're doing will never run out of ideas for improvements, big and small, no matter how well a project is managed). Sometimes an opportunity comes out of left field - "prestigious conference X just had a cancellation, so we got a slot to demo not-quite-there-yet feature Y. Do we cram to build it, or do we pass on the slot?". Of course, as mentioned, you can't have this becoming the norm, and it might not be for all temperaments to work in a company where it might happen - but it's not in an of itself a bad thing.