there are no solutions, only trade-offs
expressionprogrammingops culture
Thomas Sowell's economics dictum, adopted whole by engineering: every choice purchases its benefits with costs elsewhere.
Consistency versus availability, security versus usability, flexibility versus simplicity - the mature design conversation is not 'which option is right' but 'which costs can we live with'. Anyone selling a pure solution has hidden the invoice.
Thomas Sowell's formulation is that there are no solutions, only trade-offs, and applied to engineering it is the most reliable filter available for evaluating a proposal. Anything presented as strictly better is either poorly understood or is being sold.
The trade is sometimes obvious and often hidden. Caching trades consistency for latency, redundancy trades cost and complexity for availability, abstraction trades performance and debuggability for flexibility, strong typing trades verbosity for safety, and a microservice architecture trades in-process simplicity for organizational independence. In every case the second half is real and gets omitted in the pitch.
The practical use is a question rather than a position: what does this cost, and who pays it. The answer is frequently that the cost lands on someone not in the room, later, which is how organizations accumulate decisions that were locally rational and collectively unmanageable. A proposal whose author can state its downside clearly is one that has been thought about; a proposal with no stated downside is one where the downside has not yet been located.