This is a fun read, its one of my favorite games growing up by far, countless hours sunk into it. I didn't need this write-up to know that Chris Sawyer was god among men and that the open source version is a huge labor of love, but its a good reminder :) I will need to give OpenRCT a try some time, I've tried a little OpenTTD and really enjoy it, but RCT was always my jam.

For the lesson here, I think re-contextualizing the product design in order to ease development should be a core tenant of modern software engineering (or really any form of engineering). This is why we are usually saying that we need to shift left on problems, discussing the constraints up-front lets us inform designers how we might be able to tweak a few designs early in order to save big time on the calendar. All of the projects that I loved being a part of in my career did this well, all of the slogs were ones that employed a leadership-driven approach that amounted to waterfall.