The folks at Lucid were starting to get a little worried because I would bring them review drafts of papers arguing for worse is better, and later I would bring them rebuttals against myself. One fellow was seriously nervous that I might have a mental disease.
after over a decade of thinking and speaking about it . . . [I wrote] "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" In this short paper, I came out against worse is better. But a month or so later, I wrote a second one, called "Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!" which was in favor of it.
This is the heart of engineering or politics: finding the optimal compromise.
