You raise interesting points and you present them well. They have interesting parallels.
One of the things I often try to impress upon others during $day_job is that it is important to always know and appreciate (and seek to find, and perhaps enhance) the very best way to do a thing.
It's not that we can't cheat. It's not even that cheating isn't sometimes adequate or permissible -- or, sometimes, necessary. Sometimes the most-proper way to achieve a thing within the confines of the constraints is to very deliberately cheat in a defensible fashion.
Like a Wilkinson combiner/splitter when used in the bidirectional RF space: It cheats. (It also works within its limitations and has great value in some applications. It's not universal at all.)
In some cases, cheating even requires review by an engineer to approve a particular method in a particular application.
But when we don't seek to know the best, most-right way to do a thing then we can't even recognize when we're cheating. When cheating and gettin'-'er-done is typical, fast-and-loose becomes the norm instead of the exception, and that's just doing ourselves (and the job, and the company, and the client) an unwarranted disservice.
And that does ultimately is just fumbling and drifting around, just as you succinctly suggest.
But standards aren't the be-all, end-all rule. At least when safety isn't a concern: They should be flexible to preference when preferences exist, and that preference extends beyond salt appropriation.
I once made an accidental purchase after a long day at work where I bought feta instead of the ricotta that I intended to buy. My family was predictably hungry when I got home and realized the depth of my mistake. So I built that lasagna anyway with the "wrong" cheese in the intermediate layers, and it turned out so excellent that I will never make lasagna any other way again. It's really lovely, and it was entirely the result of fumbling.
Or: Chicago, vs NYC, vs Detroit. These guys will never agree on what the best pizza consists of, but most of us can find an example of a pie in any of those regional styles that is lovely and satisfying to us.
It's very easy for me to accept variability in the norms of foods, and of painting styles, and of audio system implementations. I can't define a perfect guitar, or a perfect piano. These are all things that I think deeply involve emotional (perhaps even irrational) personal choice. There can be more than one way, and it's OK. We don't all appreciate the same tastes, sights, and sounds. The variability is a feature, not a bug.
But meanwhile: It's very difficult for me to accept variability in, say, electrical systems. There can be an established and objective best, safest, most-defensible way. And the method behind the walls is not the kind of thing that usually elicits an emotional response from the beholder while they plug in a lamp in their new place, so the best way can win.