Yeah, the general attitude that estimation is impossible, guesswork, or useless is simply not commercially or professionally defensible. Other fields do it all the time without our tools, competencies, supposed specialties, or environmental control.

If one needs more information to articulate the issue at hand, get it. If the estimate is being misrepresented (ideal days vs calendar days), clarify. If methodology is uncertain, do it and iterate and improve it with experience.

Playing coy about how long it takes to build a deck based on a sketch and current availability, while making cute wordplay about how ‘the deck has to be built before one can know what deck there was to build to begin with’…? Whatever, Confucius, it really doesn’t sound like there’s enough deck building experience here, and the obfuscation seems unserious and anxiety related.