[wycats]

Shipping without understand is no virtue, and as far as I can tell, there's no hard conflict between the two.

The entire official story of "lean" is "build, measure, learn", which is fundamentally about developing a process for shipping while deepening an understanding.

The hermeneutic circle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle) cited by Dave Herman of Mozilla Research and Brendan Eich (about JavaScript) is a process of iteration that prizes a deepening understanding interleaved with lessons learned from shipping.

I didn't interpret the OP to be saying that she wanted to gain a perfect understanding before shipping, but rather that she preferred a style that focused more than the tech community average on deepening understanding.

And I don't think she needs to go to a different branch of technology to get that. Maybe app development needs more of it.

Steve Jobs famously talked about the interplay between understanding and building: https://wycats.svbtle.com/theres-a-tremendous-amount-of-craf....

I think we could do worse than to think about this topic more.