Huh, maybe the thinking that everything has to be perfect is rooted in products where people do pay for what's under the hood? I.e. literally cars.
The way I see it, programmer perfectionism comes from learning - the projects you do for yourself, early on, are small enough that you can hit perfect trade-offs on your limited needs, and you aren't under time pressure. You quickly learn you can achieve near-perfection - a lesson which stops applying when working with any nontrivial codebase at work.
(Not sure where I was going with this)
You can add a lot of spice by propping up the care with some nicely tuned turbo, pedal behavior and cooling that is sufficient for just a few accelerations. Most people will never find out the difference.