For many situations too much elegance means too much cost - not less cost. Saving a week of code optimization may mean 40*$150 in salaries and $5000 in lost sales from a week later market release. If you only sell the 10k units, then a $1 cost reduction from extra work will end in a loss. Besides the fact that the extra week of work means someone wasn't productive with the next product.

In one case I added 3 days of engineering to save $0.89 in board cost which made sense for a product to be made in 100.000s. Had I done the same for a product to be made in 100s it would have been waste.

Unfortunately, some put a lot of effort into making the 'best' product (spending inordinate amounts of time 'saving' money)

Unfortunately some put no effort into making the 'best' product (unnecessarily wasting resources)

Erik