Or worse, the pursuit of beautiful, well-tested, aesthetically-pleasing code that is never finished and never shipped.

That's true. Except when interviewers see your profile and they suddenly care a lot about the hacky code you wrote at 3am on a saturday for fun. sigh...

Imagine how many billion dollar ideas are just sitting on peoples hard-drives

True. It's a balance that we as developers must always seek; Some people say that premature optimization is evil. Premature code refactoring can be just as damaging.