I think the idea is that they didn't ignore as much as you can along the way. They spent a lot of time on each of their foundations, completing (to some degree) each layer before moving onto the next.
> It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit
They didn't do the bare minimum modeling without tooling, didn't hack together (or avoid making) barely enough converter programs, they didn't hack together an in-memory database as a prototype, and they didn't do the bare minimum rendering to show a triangle.
They built out a fully working system, layer by layer, the entire breadth of each layer, until they got to the rendering and display layers. At the end of it, they got a triangle. But, since they put in all of the effort to build a strong foundation, the second triangle is 1000x easier to make than the first.
> It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit
They didn't do the bare minimum modeling without tooling, didn't hack together (or avoid making) barely enough converter programs, they didn't hack together an in-memory database as a prototype, and they didn't do the bare minimum rendering to show a triangle.
They built out a fully working system, layer by layer, the entire breadth of each layer, until they got to the rendering and display layers. At the end of it, they got a triangle. But, since they put in all of the effort to build a strong foundation, the second triangle is 1000x easier to make than the first.