No, it really doesn't require that. But we're getting into the topic of project planning, which is a larger subject than we can tackle in the comments here. Fortunately, this is a topic discussed in great detail elsewhere.

> But it’s also possible that the first engineer was just better, and the second had terrible system design skills and constant spaghetti code that made a simple project seem complex.

Right, I was intending to cover that with my "acceptable quality" conditional.