[atoav]

What I argued here is not that you cannot and will not negotiate quality. I argued that taking it below a certain quality level is not an option for most people. You wouldn't for example not escape the commas present within the fields of an incoming csv file simply based on the fact that this would be bad engineering and allow injections or make your program crash. And I am not sure any customer could negotiate me into doing that, it would just be silly.

I was working in VFX where you always had to talk about quality, yet I didn't take certain jobs, because below a certain quality level VFX make no sense anymore (unless bad FX are the point of the movie) — below a certain level you won't be happy, the customer won't be happy, it won't be work that you can show etc.

Granted: coming to this from "quality is not negotiable" is a far stretch, but that was the way I initially read it. Maybe a better heuristic would be "Below a certain quality level, don't bother"