Very much agree with this. It seems like a sort of analysis paralysis that specifically affects some programmers. Reminds me of a HN post a while back actually by someone who was passionate about building games, but ended up generalizing into building game engine tools, then graphical tools, etc., eventually spending years building ever more general tools, without making any real progress toward his true goal.

You can write your code with modularity in mind, without necessarily having to completely decouple and generalize everything. Once it becomes sufficiently beneficial for a particular module, the refactoring then shouldn't be too onerous.

(Regardless, this 'beautiful code checklist' is fantastic.)