Comment by jamil7

Apart from the one catastrophic failure you mention it sounds like, from a business perspective this worked? You were able to extend your tech debt long enough to start generating money and are now in a position to pay it back. From an engineering perspective I agree it's a grind to pay all this back and lose so much velocity. Are their business strategies that favour slower more careful engineering practises? mission-critical systems come to mind but maybe also nth-movers could be put in there? Where you know what you're building and competing with but want to make the best version of X.