One of my big focuses when I'm designing a system is not to get everything right up front, but to always be looking two or three steps ahead and making sure there is a reasonable path to get to where we need to be.
This is very key! This goes back to the "driving the car vs. aiming a cannon" analogy from Extreme Programming. Instead of aiming a cannon and hitting the target in one shot, a driver steers moment to moment while thinking about the road ahead and the next turn. (As opposed to driving with no thinking about the next turn and the road ahead, which is just bad driving.)
Young designers who don't have a lot of experience tend to cargo cult the more complicated designs they see in other systems without deeply understanding what those are there for.
Also very key. One shouldn't just imitate the form, but understand the forces that determined the form!
This is very key! This goes back to the "driving the car vs. aiming a cannon" analogy from Extreme Programming. Instead of aiming a cannon and hitting the target in one shot, a driver steers moment to moment while thinking about the road ahead and the next turn. (As opposed to driving with no thinking about the next turn and the road ahead, which is just bad driving.)
Young designers who don't have a lot of experience tend to cargo cult the more complicated designs they see in other systems without deeply understanding what those are there for.
Also very key. One shouldn't just imitate the form, but understand the forces that determined the form!