The good news if you take 2 years to ship the system "properly" then you won't have to re-factor it because the company went out of business or that product was too late to market.
There is a phrase "million dollar problems". You do stuff at your startup that will take a million dollars to fix because it doesn't scale.
The point is that if your startup doesn't get to that scale then it doesn't matter. If you startup does reach that scale then you have plenty of money/people to spend a million dollars fixing it.
Replies like yours gloss over nuance. I don't mind prioritizing time to market as a programmer; I am not clueless, I understand that imperfect product that pours money into my employer's coffers is infinitely better than it sinking and we all get fired out of necessity.
My problem comes from the fact that the leadership _never_ compromises and never allows us to avoid at least some crises that are extremely easy to foresee (and have happened like clockwork in 95% of the cases where I or other colleagues have predicted them).
Again, sure, let's go to market and start making sales. I completely agree. But scolding a dev for fixing a DB schema anomaly that slows down ~40% of _all_ feature requests and that it took him the grand day or two to do so, is not just myopic. It's moronic.
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Even shorter / TL;DR version: If the balance of power was 80% leadership and 20% engineers, I'd still be completely OK with that. But wherever I go the "balance" of power is more like 99% leadership and 1% engineers (and that's only when stuff really has hit the fan; they'd take away that last one percent as well if they could).
That is the problem. There's no balance. No compromise. Just people barking orders.
There is a phrase "million dollar problems". You do stuff at your startup that will take a million dollars to fix because it doesn't scale.
The point is that if your startup doesn't get to that scale then it doesn't matter. If you startup does reach that scale then you have plenty of money/people to spend a million dollars fixing it.