It's not so binary though. If "perfect" takes 3 years, and "mad-max" takes 6 months, how good and maintainable a product can you muster in 9-12 months?

There is non-linearity here where you beat the "6 month" competitor the following year, because their product is buggy as hell and unmaintainable, but you keep cranking out solid features on your maintainable codebase/infra.