[dullroar]

Agree with all points. Here's another - depending on the size of the shop and the population of users it will be delivered to, there are trade-offs that must be made as you go towards zero on both of those axes. For example, if you have two developers delivering in-house apps to 250 end-users in a SMB company, then the answer is never, "That will take two years and $2M." It is, "We can have that for you in a month," and then you deal later with things that necessarily got skipped. Sometimes it means refactoring and bug fixing, if the pain points to the business are large enough. Sometimes that may mean reaching into a database to fix data that is caused by a complex bug that only manifests itself once a year and isn't worth fixing outright (because there are other things you're working on now). That outlook is probably way to "Realpolitik" for the purists, but it is reality in small shops (which still do exist).