I worked on a Perl app for a couple of months, then wrote all the code in a week. It was a matter of going page by page and writing each routine as-specified. And, mind you, it felt a bit strange not to be “figuring it out and...” But the code deployed, was used frenetically by lots of people almost at once, and it never had a single problem report logged against it. It works.

Good for you.

Too bad you just lack the imagination that if X works for you, Y actually may work for someone else (with Y being "different developers", "different company", "different product", "different customers"). I just don't buy the "X works for me, so Y must suck".

My customers are saying "XYZ may become big - can you do a small, no bells-or-frills implementation we can play around with"? Half of those pilot projects are canned ("no, isn't what we want", "is what we want, but doesn't actually give us more revenue", "too hard to sell", "we have different ideas now"). Half of the rest are shelved, to maybe tried later again. The rest is developed further ("we now also want an interface to manage it, instead of typing in database statements", "we want to control who gets access to it", "can we have it in green?"). Successful projects (and by definition, a project cannot be successful unless it has the operational data to back its success up) may be developed further. Oh, and what's a success now may no longer be a success 6 months from now. Because the market may have changed.

What I do know is that if I first spend a few months designing the ultimate way of doing something, then some time implementing, my customer cannot make any progress (testing it, demoing it to his customer, making revenue, finding out what the next step is) during those months, and, more importantly, I'm robbing the entire chain (me, my team, my customers, the company, the customers the company is serving) the opportunity of early failure.