> Not fond of these metrics. Feels easy to gamify and hack. I can just push commit a when it's more mature, good I improved the metric, but reduced tinkering, collaboration with devs and product and probably released a subpar solution.

This is not gamed/hacked -- it's the metric working as designed. It is meant to measure purely how fast you can get commits into production. If you have found a way to do that faster, then the metric should increase to reflect that.

So there are two aspects of the problem: are you delivering fast, and are you delivering something valuable?

The delivery lead time doesn't even pretend to measure whether you're delivering something valuable. You need a different metric for that. And in your example, that would go down by your practise.