It definitely is. The problem, I think, is that people forget these fundamental concepts when they're shoved into a giant legacy code base that clearly didn't follow that process. They seem to get overwhelmed by the spaghetti and forget their entire undergrad curriculum.

As a side note, I find it helpful to think of what the high level business objects will be at the beginning, but build a bunch of utility functions from the bottom up, working towards a DSL of sorts at the various abstraction levels. As you explore the solution, the end location of those functions usually becomes abundantly clear.