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Before I worked on firmware I worked on PCB layout. Thing you learn from that is you can keep fucking with the layout forever and it is simply pointless from a business perspective. Spend an extra day 'cleaning up' the layout. Well sweet now your delivery slipped a day.

Also experience with redactoring away a wart only to find there is now a wart somewhere else.

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Difference with PCB is that it is normally one off job. If you are building a one off application or a script, clean code is not very important.

If you are building a system that will be used for years and needs to be extensible than it makes much more sense. Just like it would make sense if you got your PCB back and needed to change features or add new ones.

Exactly. I did layout for awhile. Some boards you knew weren't going to come back. Customer was just paying for us to turn a schematic and BOM into a board with the least amount of cost possible. Quoted low. You could let the autorouter have at it. But other boards (especially finicky high clock speed chip tester boards) would definitely be coming back. Sure you could let the autorouter do its thing, but when that board came back for a rev, I'd have to fuck with all of that laziness to make space for new components or reduce the layer count.

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