I take frugal to mean being smart or conservative with spending. However, optimizing to the extent some people are talking about here would redefine the term to mean "irrational" for me.

The Einstein quote is as applicable as ever: "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

That's just being nice. We developers are a right bunch of cheap bastards. At least I am. I'm working on it, but it's just so ingrained and pervasive, it's weird. I've been trying to figure out where it comes from for a while now, and how to get people to work past it, with little success.

If there was a magic debugger that made debugging 100x easier and faster, but it wasn't free and open source, I'd still have a hard time using it even though it would save me a bunch of time, and easily pay for itself in time and frustration saved.