[njonsson]

That’s the most compelling argument I’ve heard for regularly paying down technical debt, and/or for acquiring it with great care. The craftsmanship argument — made by Uncle Bob and others — holds guilty appeal for me as a hacker but strikes me as self-indulgent. What’s compelling about your perspective here is its rational basis in the interest of the product owner. I had not thought of user stories as an abstraction, and therefore a probably leaky abstraction.