Domain knowledge is very important. In the real world however by the time you finish this type of process the competition will have had the product out already. It may not be that perfect castle in the sky but it will work and if you have revenue you will have time and means to improve.
Our customers don't even want to pay for something that bespoke. They have margins to worry about.
So instead we've had to make a system which makes it less painful when bugs occur.
For us that means making it trivial to run older major and minor versions our software, and an automated update mechanism which delivers new builds to customers on-premise in less than an hour, updating the DB schema as well.
I don't think this excludes what the GP said, but this is super important as well. I think of it as second-order reliability: design your software not only so that bugs don't occur, but also so that the user can take practical steps to remedy bugs if they do occur.
(Also, as one of my past companies enshrined as an engineering axiom: "write software to be debugged". Most programmers write waaay too few logs. You know the print statements you add to your code when it's buggy, to track down what's going wrong? Well, do that all the time, and if there are too many then fix that problem with adequate tooling. If it's running on your customers' computers - whether servers or PCs or phones - then store them locally for N days / N logs and allow them to be submitted when a bug occurs. Stack traces - even good ones - are not nearly enough.)
100% agree. It's a trade-off. Get product-market fit first and learn what you can about the domain. Spend enough time on architecture up front so you can easily pivot. That's all the simplicity you should care about at that point.
Once you get traction, you can start to afford to have the crazy vision. IMO, at that point it's easily worth the risk. A decent research team will probably discover something, and potentially extremely valuable knowledge.
If you were James Clerk Maxwell before he published his equations, how much would they be worth to you, especially if you had paying customers?
