It takes 10+ years for any storage engine to iron out all the wrinkles, get it to a state where it's both fast enough, and you can trust it to not lose data. It's stupid to throw it away once it reaches that point.
It's not stupid if the 10+ years code is unmaintainable. Why did you ignore that part?
People keep saying it takes 10 years, but that presupposes methods that never improve. Why would we keep doing the same thing over and over again? Wouldn't be much point in that.