I remember carefully crafting a software framework for my Ph.D. I got it running, it worked perfectly, it didn't deliver any advantages vs state of the art. I think it took me 7 mths to write. I then slapped together another one, and that took me 3 mths, it worked (just about), it produced some decent results, and I could move onto the next thing. The software I was producing now was not good but this was in fact excellent experience for research software development as as my work progressed into more innovative areas I found that many, many ideas didn't work out at all, so the priority was to be able to develop code really really fast. I suspect that this is what is going on with most research code - write it really fast, not really good.