With that kind of build latency, you're weeding out people who don't want to spend their whole day on coffee break.

Yeah, I guess. I rather enjoyed those days but was always craving more power to just get on with it.

And those build times were nothing compared to waiting for a long SQL process.

It's all really just determining whether the data flowed properly or not. From a C64 BASIC program to an OS component to a database's tables, it's all just data flowing from one place/form to another.