Reading your essay it feels like you were obsessed with the product's artefacts, the methodology, the tech stack, the hosting, the scalability, the suportabiliry..., far more than wth the solution and getting the first sale.

All of these are good qualities, but if you then do not have a product owner to push back and force you to deliver fast and cut every corner imaginable, you can indeed find yourself in endless development rewrites and optimisations.

I have seen quite a few startups up close in Belgium, and I'm fairly confident that you would be horrified by the code base and operations of the ones that are succeeding.

P.S. Smartschool seems to be triving in the Belgian school system.

What the comment you're replying to is saying, is that if you were deeply obsessed with the problem, you wouldn't have to think twice to make trade-offs. If the problem you're solving really needs solving right now, you will always make the trade-off that gets your solution into the world faster. You're not obsessed with the fact that teams all over the world could have less sucky meetings if they had an even incomplete version of your product in hand right now.

Others have said already but switching cloud providers, kubernetes, ci/CD, couch... it seems more like you were more interested in playing with tech than building a company