"Anybody can build a good chair for $10,000 or a good PC for $100,000."

And some people can build a great PC for $1,000 that runs circles around the good PC for $100,000.

There's so much more to engineering than thinking in terms of time and cost constraints. Those are real constraints, but they're not the most important.

Engineering is design. If you have good design, good insight, you can do things that people with infinite time and budget could never dream to achieve. You can start making a product that's a hundred times more powerful for a tenth of the price in a fraction of the time. If you don't have good design, good insight, then no amount of time or budget can help you.