We contend that the worse is better design philosophy, while highly successful, is inherently misguided. In particular, we argue that worse is better succeeds by imposing a disproportionate cost on users. Since the first design which solves a useful subset of a problem tends to win even in the face of better, but later, competition (the so-called first-mover advantage), successful but suboptimal designs often become entrenched. To avoid this problem and encourage the most useful designs, we propose a more nuanced development philosophy, growable-is-better, which offers many of the benefits of worse-is-better but helps contain the cost to the community.