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Anything else is a waste of time and money unless management dictates otherwise.Management won't say otherwise because management relies on what software engineers tell them, as it's the job of the engineer to consider quality, reliability and operational efficiency, and advise management on the tradeoffs involved. An engineer can choose to not pick the cheapest possible option.
Your "rational software engineer" instead sounds more like someone that's happy to go with substandard solution that's bad for the user and bad for the entire field of software engineering (the more it's used, the more it's normalized), and then hide behind greedy management and penny-pinching beancounters.
People sometimes wonder if software wouldn't get better (boy technologically and socially) if software engineering was a licensed profession. Well, we don't deserve to be licensed professionals, because we've abandoned respect and loyalty to our field, and became just "professionals" in the cultural sense of doing cheapest stuff the fastest and dumping all externalities on customers (on third parties).