Over my quota, so can't read the NW article, but your point matches my experience strongly. I think of it as a delayed gratification problem. There's a bunch o

Over my quota, so can't read the NW article, but your point matches my experience strongly. I think of it as a delayed gratification problem. There's a bunch of gratification that comes from building something cool, and having people around you appreciate it. If you can get a lot of that based on just the idea of the thing, then you've got much less motivation to actually build it. If you're going to get 1000 plaudits for finishing, that might keep you going through 10 ergos of work. But if you cash in 800 plaudits right off, now you're faced with 10 ergos of work for only 200 plaudits: and that's an exchange rate it is difficult to justify. A similar thing happens with releasing little and often, for the same reason. It is massively motivating, until the 4th or 5th release, then you hit the wall of rapidly diminishing returns.