I’ve had some experience developing an infrastructure-level system for use around the world.

I had to maintain it, almost completely alone, for ten years, before it was taken over by a competent team, and I could finally walk away.

One of the most important things I did, in that decade, was say “no” a lot.

Some folks were not happy about it, and Godwin’s Law was invoked on my ass, multiple times.

A lot of requests were ones that would optimize for a specific use case, but it was a generalist system, so it had to remain “imperfect.”

In the end, it all worked out well, if not “perfectly.” It’s now a worldwide system, being run by hundreds of organizations, and used daily, by thousands of people.