Isn't what he describes "the Perfect Solution" problem? In politics, it's used to block any progress by attacking the fact that the solution is not perfect. Obama talks about it often in relation to getting things done. Even if he wanted single payer healthcare, faced with it being impossible, he does the next best thing. His adversaries would blame him for an imperfect solution, but so would many of his supporters. Though there are things that he hasn't made progress on, I'd say overall his method works.

I'd take "proper solutions" to mean "nothing improper" which, to my understanding, is an extremely practical and feasible design goal for quality control purposes. Proper solutions definitely exist in this context. Encryption, handling user input, speed optimizations are good examples.

I'd go further and say, if a solution is proper (not wrong), and progressive (makes something better), it's good enough. Maximizing the better part might be subjective yada yada, but better is measurable, and there is no need to introduce the "proper" problem when dealing with the "better" problem. Whatever "better" that needs to get done should get done "properly". Isn't that what we're all already doing?

And of course, nothing is ever perfect. But it's a good moving target.