Sometimes it makes sense to take that hour of savings today at the cost of 5 hours later, though. I've been on projects where we knew a competitor was coming to market soon, and sacrificed a bit on code quality to beat them. We ended up launching 2 weeks before they did, which meant that when they finally did launch, the press was all like "But can they compete with Company X, who launched a similar feature two weeks ago?" Doing things the right way would've added about another month and a half - if we'd paid that cost up-front, the press reaction may've been "But their relevance may be fading, because Company Y launched similar features a month ago."
I agree. You really have to be disciplined to do this, though, because there is always something in a startup that needs to be done right now. Rushing for a month and then taking two weeks to refactor/improve code is fine. But doing the same for 12 months is a big gamble.
