> But an accretion of kludges around an insufficient set of core functionality is absolutely worse than having a little extra functionality that you end up deleting later.

I agree that an accretion of kludges is bad. The problem here comes down to usually the skill of the programmer when the new work comes up. To people who don't understand the code, they are more likely to make what they think is a simple kludge than actually refactor to solve the problem "correctly", which usually involves more thought and creativity.

Whereas extra functionality usually increases the code surface area, and once published as a public interface to a library, is very costly and painful to delete. Then it festers as complications to new code that is added have to assume this extra functionality is used rather than not.