Some of the most beautiful code I’ve ever seen has come of an engineer going off for several months and coming back with a 1MB patch.

That kind of time allows some actual deep thought to happen. Some kinds of outcomes won’t happen any other way. I agree with that point in the quora answer.

This comes to mind as a recent example of an engineering project that had no incremental alternative: https://webkit.org/blog/9329/a-new-bytecode-format-for-javas...