I think you drew the right conclusion from your experience, but I also want to point out that building the first prototype is always anywhere from one to three orders of magnitude easier than building the actual product.
The devil is in the details, and software is nothing but details. The product owner at the company I work for likens it (somewhat illogically, but it works) with constructing walls. You can either pick whatever stones you have lying around, and then you'll spend a lot of time trying to fit them together and you'll have a hell of a time trying to repair the wall when a section breaks. Or you can build it from perfectly rectangular bricks, and it will be easy to make it taller one layer at a time.
Using whatever rocks you have lying around is like building a prototype in Excel. Carefully crafting layers of abstraction using proper software engineering procedures means taking the time to make those rectangular bricks before building the wall. End result more predictable when life happens to the wall.
The devil is in the details, and software is nothing but details. The product owner at the company I work for likens it (somewhat illogically, but it works) with constructing walls. You can either pick whatever stones you have lying around, and then you'll spend a lot of time trying to fit them together and you'll have a hell of a time trying to repair the wall when a section breaks. Or you can build it from perfectly rectangular bricks, and it will be easy to make it taller one layer at a time.
Using whatever rocks you have lying around is like building a prototype in Excel. Carefully crafting layers of abstraction using proper software engineering procedures means taking the time to make those rectangular bricks before building the wall. End result more predictable when life happens to the wall.