[greatgib]

"4 years later it's clear that those backlog features would not have helped at all. It is a good thing they never got built."

To me, it is a survivor bias. How could you know where you would have been now if you built these features of your backlog 4 years ago?

Maybe some things would have been easier and faster, maybe you would have been bigger, got more customers and money. Maybe you would have done a big breakthrough that would have transformed your project into something different and better. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, or worst, or would have led you to bankruptcy.

Maybe there is a security hole that you did well to not spend time fixing because no one abused of it (...yet), or maybe some hackers could have leaked all your customer base to some random forum killing your company because of this missing fix.

The outcome is unsure, but you can't easily consider as a generality that you had not needed them.