Not everything can or should be well engineered. People that always chase this are worshipping false gods. Does anyone have experience working on something that at one point actually met with the high ideals a certain mindset strives for?
I've worked on enough projects to have covered both sides of the equation. The pristine codebase that belonged on a museum yet took way too much time to ship a feature. The other side of the coin with the codebase that somehow worked (no one knew how) and brought in millions because people would keep piling stuff on top of it. Have also worked with a codebase that started off awfully and was cleaned up enough to reduce the amount of time lost on stupid bugs and and thus increased how effective the team was delivering new features (with a direct financial improvement as a result because sales picked up significantly). It all boils down to finding a balance. Sadly, people confuse technical perfection with a product that works.