So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha.

You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price.

(At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…)

* I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html

But also, there is more traffic on the bridge.

The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel.

Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations.