They seem to encourage the original poster to adopt a short-term, sycophantic perspective where she punts her desire to keep the code-base clean and maintainable in exchange for blindly following requirements and putting forward a good image. I know there are a certain class of people who recoil in instinctive disgust at the suggestion, even after being reasoned with and beaten down; I am one of them.
One of the posters even mentions the books that talk about this sort of thing, and then dismisses them as irrelevant to the true goals of management. Most of these books contain the wisdom of people who have seen many projects and products, and have a reasonable idea of what makes one successful from a technical stand-point. The reason they were written is because the authors saw enough projects fail when not following the practices they suggest. It isn't just wishful thinking written by technically minded trolls.
Reading all these comments I am reminded of the first section of a book I read recently which helped me realize I wasn't alone. I believe I have mentioned it on here in a prior post; Uncle Bob's _Clean Code_. One of the most salient points he makes in the first chapter is that the quality of the code-base is the responsibility of the developers, because they are the only ones who have the most concrete sense regarding the cost of bad code. In the long run, it will make everyone look completely incompetent, even if in the short-term things appear to be getting done at a very rapid rate. Eventually, your clients will care, your managers will care, and “I was just following orders” will not be an acceptable excuse because they were looking to you for intelligence and wisdom, not just units of work done without deep analysis.