[espeed]

It does take a while to build understanding. Maybe the reason many people's understanding is so "fragile", as Feynman observed (http://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&lpg=PP1&#3...), is because they don't spend enough time building it and so they only have surface-level understanding.

But once you get over the initial hump in whatever area you are digging in to, once you've explored it from every angle, you'll be able to move faster and make better decisions.

Rich Hickey spent a year researching and building his understanding before writing Clojure, and another before Datomic. This practice would seem to go against the lean startup methodology, but maybe we shouldn't be starting a startup until we have done this for the technologies we are using.