These things usually form triangles with "cheap, good, fast: pick any two" being the canonical case.

What's the 3rd point in your triangle? I suspect it's "developer time" or "price" which boil down to the same thing depending on who's doing the measuring.

We are essentially talking about situations where variables are partly independent, and here you are trying to bring everything back to a zero sum game already. I shouldn’t be responding at all, but ok, I’ll bite.

Skill.

Writing slow, unmaintainable code is usually a false economy. But many people just don’t know any better.

Take the refactoring Extract Variable, which is probably the simplest example. You name an intermediate value, thereby documenting it. Then hoist it out of the loop, making it faster, shorter, and clear that this value should not change.

Triangles are just a convenient way to frame the three-dimensional relationship. Theoretically you can take it to any number of dimensions with fairly obvious extensions to the definition; however, it starts to become computationally expensive and human-impractical to gain much understanding that way.

This is why almost no matter what you put on the points of the triangle, it works; as long as on the frontier there is at least some opposition, it works. The times you can have all of X and all of Y are rare, and all of three things essentially unheard of.