It's perfectionism that prevents people from shipping what's by reasonable standards already past the finish line, because they keep redoing and polishing "good enough" things, ad infinitum.
Perfectionism can be a good thing producing exceptional quality results, provided you've prioritized appropriately and are playing "perfectionist" iterating in diminishing returns land.
With or without perfectionism, if you can't prioritize correctly, you'll likely fail to finish.
Perfectionism causes people to over-finish and endlessly defer shipping.
A more succinct explanation came to mind while just doing some yard work:
We've all heard and understood the wisdom of "premature optimization is the root of all evil", right?
What's being conflated here as perfectionism is a variant of premature optimization.
Perhaps we need an idiom like "Premature polishing is the root of all unfinished games".
I've seen many "perfectionists" hide behind this moniker when infact they're just incompetent when it comes to prioritizing what to do, how much to do it, and in what order.
You're not a perfectionist when you spent all your time making a "perfect" ECS at the expense of actually completing a playable game, when the latter was your actual goal. You're just a failure/incompetent. But "perfectionist" certainly sounds better for the ego.
I also don’t think that analogy works because the things he mentioned mostly do need to be touched to develop the core game loop. The problem he has is that once he touches something he can’t leave it dirty. That’s the way in which it’s perfectionism.
It's not perfectionism because you can't even succeed at making the perfect part without more of the whole defining what perfect even looks like. The requirements evolve/emerge as the whole does.
It's just misguided premature effort, but there's a very strong force driving this mistake - it's easier and more fun to trim the sails than build the rest of the ship.
