[phendrenad2]

Intelligence signaling. Programmers love to show off to their colleagues how smart they are, so they try to anticipate all possible upgrade paths. "What if the user doesn't have an email address, betcha didn't think of that. That's why you hired me, the tech master, with over 9000 confirmed code commits". This leads to code that is overly generic, but still a big ball of mud. What you want, instead, is for people to be humble and accept that future changes won't be something anyone can anticipate now, and instead adhere to principles that, in general, lead to modular codebases which can respond to changes flexibly.