[gautamnarula]

>There is no big picture. There is only hill climbing and getting stuck on local maxima constantly.

This really nicely describes why I think so much software becomes bloated. You see this with startups all the time--at first the product is hacky/clunky/lacking features, then after some time and love it does a small set of things really, really well and is truly a joy to use, and then later on it becomes slow, bloated, and trying to do far too much and ends up doing many things unremarkablely rather than a few things well (the opposite of "half, not half-assed").

I think that last stage happens when you have individual teams A/B testing new changes independently and hacking on each new piece without much thought to the overarching cohesiveness of the product. All the incentives naturally align toward this too, so it takes some really strong leadership to prevent it and have a broader product vision that supercedes all the local optima of each individual team's features.

(As a side note, this also often happens when the software/startup needs to be monetized)