[titzer]

This is exactly what YAGNI is meant to counter: the constant tendency of programmers to add speculative extension capabilities that are never used. These add complexity and cognitive overhead. It's a net loss.

Also, people pretend like refactoring is hard. My experience is that refactoring is only hard on the ends of the spectrum, where someone has added all the wrong abstractions, or no abstractions at all. Of the two, I'd prefer the latter, but obviously anything in the middle is usually better.