I think something that is lost in this conversation is that "quickly" maps to wildly different results in code quality depending on the programmer. It sounds l

I think something that is lost in this conversation is that "quickly" maps to wildly different results in code quality depending on the programmer. It sounds like your CTO did not just operate quickly, but also sloppy and chaotic. From what I am gathering from this thread, the best practice is to move quickly AND organized such that refactoring is reasonable.