/me nods...

You’re right... it is not simple.   And the exploratory ventures that you made, I would say, indeed are not “scrap,” because you knew what you were doing and chose to do it in a certain way ... to better ascertain whether it would be a good idea to move the project in a certain direction.   And it seems that your intuitions were, as you say, prescient.

You are right, also, that I oversimplified ... because when one is making a point, and trying to do so in some semi-readable way, a single key idea needs to be presented clearly.   I hope that it did that.

If we can just get away from the idea that “the world of business is like a sports team,” that will be a start (although I doubt it will ever happen).   Folks love to watch sports, for some reason, and it never seriously occurs to them that what they are witnesing is, in a real way, a staged theatrical performance.   It isn’t the real world at all.