You got it right.

The question of “what does it do” is much more important than “how does it mechanically go about doing it.” Most machinery has a protective cover; so does programming. It is a surprisingly easy thing to buy-or-build a beautiful looking machine that does exactly what its designers intended, but that doesn't do what you need it to do. You get the very-uncomfortable feeling, uncomfortable and also very-correct, that the design team never really understood what was needed. So the machine is tight, beautiful, well-made, and utterly useless.

Another issue can be the unspoken requirements. For example, no matter what my inward- or outward-facing website is supposed to do, I don't want it to be shame-faced by some "133t h4x0r d00d," and I also don't want it to wind up on The Great Grand-Nephew of Web Pages That Suck. I want it to be, as IBM would say, “Reliable, Availabile, Serviceable.” To have “merchantability and fitness to a particular purpose.” That takes a tremendous amount of discipline to achieve as a consistently reliable and predictable process, and most shops don't seem to be able to do it.