Can confirm this. In a lot of design schools (I went into architecture school) students are taught to iterate, iterate, iterate to improve and refine on their design. It's very rare to see great designs 100% complete on the first try, and often you see early models and prototypes tossed to the side after the final product is due.

From the short-term, economic perspective, watching someone hammer away at something when "tried-and-true" solutions exist (with some 'creative' twists ofc) can even seem irrational and wasteful. One famous Modernist architect, Phillip Johnson, even quipped that,"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."

People who can't handle the waste in design probably would never shell out for proper R&D or scientific developments either. Hardly anyone gets it right on their first try, even in research.

It's funny because when creative endeavors finally pay off, they can pay off big and then they themselves become the "tried-and-true" trend that people follow.