Plenty of time to do it wrong

I remember a maxim from a poster in a school I saw once as a kid: "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" That principle doesn't seem to apply here.

Just before my vacation there was a flare-up in the minor project because one guy wanted to reconsider this yet again. As I mentally rehashed the rejected alternatives, I had second thoughts about one of them. I had said way back then that I'd like to handle the table a fourth way if only we had time, but it seemed like it was just days from being done. Doing the table the fourth way would take at least a couple days and probably more than a week - there might have been resistance to it, I just had a general idea of the fourth way and would still have to figure out details, and we definitely would have had to redo the discussion of the rule's changes. Considering that we thought the table was one of the last sticking points, I rejected the fourth way because we shouldn't hold everything up just to get this one thing just right.

Well, that was October. If I or my project team had been more realistic about how long things would actually take, we could have definitely got that table just right by now.

And even though this great example of a certain problem - can't do something quite right now because we think we're almost done, so we settle for a "close enough" approach, but then the project keeps going for months - has come from the minor project, something like this has happened probably literally dozens of times in the doomed project. Either that exact situation happens, or the reverse, where we just have to do something big just right even though we're supposed to be almost done. It's on my mind because several times this week I've seen the deletion of discussion or reg text in multiple pages at a time, and thought "I wish I hadn't worked so hard on that." Why did we make sure every i was dotted and every t was crossed and everyone on the team approved of that stuff if someone was going to throw it out with a shovel?