Very true, I agree on all points.

I would add the amount of effort put into designing and polishing any project that you can defend is correct is related to how much future development and use the project will see and how critical the project is for the company.

So, if you want to work o a nice quality project or want to spend a lot of your time on improvements to quality find yourself a project that will either see a lot of future development or a lot of future use or is extremely critical to the business or, best, all of these characteristics.

I see this mistake happen all the time -- people complaining on quality, disparaging previous developers or demanding effort to improve it just for quality sake ("because I just read this book and it can be done better") without reasonable arguments to support from business POV.

Also I see people categorizing all project deficiencies as technical debt where what they should be doing is to first establish what would be reasonable expectation regarding quality and then the debt is only what would be absolutely necessary to reach that reasonable expectation.

So for example, if you make a small app that will not reasonably see a lot of future development but is critical to work reliably in production (and it isn't) your debt would most likely be centered around making the application reliable enough and probably not around making the code nice (as long as it isn't preventing makeing the application reliable).