I find myself thinking about that a lot - mainly "how many more hours would have needed to be spent at stage A to avoid the hours being spent now to recover from problems our software is currently causing". And often if I'm honest with myself it's hard to see that the extra investment of time earlier on would have necessarily resulted in a net productivity gain. It would however likely be a less stressful way to work (building fire-proof code rather than putting fires out all the time), and rather more satisfying. As an engineer of any sort I think it's perfectly reasonable and justifiable to want to produce something of quality even if it takes longer and the consequences probably won't be that terrible if you just release the first thing you can slap together. Unfortunately others are almost entirely motivated by the (not entirely irrational) fear of what happens if you don't release something quickly enough.