[corry]

"Usually one understands a project poorly at the start and much better at the end" <--- this is 100% it, totally agree.

It also happens at the product level - building features too early or too deeply for a poorly understood workflow; abstracting things that don't need to be abstracted for probably YEARS; over-engineering for major scale despite having no users; knowing that ONE DAY you'll need, say, multi-language support, so on Day 1 you over-complicate everything by insisting on a language framework etc.

Beginners lack the foresight of 'what this will look like at scale' or maybe better said 'why this won't work at scale', but that's ironically why they are better early on - speed matters a lot more than anticipating potential scale issues years later.