> And it's really surprising how few people realise that, even if the "quick" approach is slower in the long term, time is not always worth the same!

That really only applies to "we have to launch it next week". In vast majority of projects longer than a hackathon doing even slightly better (let's say extra 20%) pays off very quickly. Because there is plenty more shades between "let's do that in immediately simplest way with zero thinking" vs "let's build our own DB engine to handle the problem". With exception being maybe "we're just prototyping few approaches to the problem"

The "but we need to be agile and launch fast" is more often excuse than legitimate reason.