I see this as kinda the flipside of "how to draw an owl" [1]. A smarter programmer than me once described software as "do 90%, then do the other 90%" - the mvp, first functional prototype, heck, even the first deliverable is great and all, but then it's time for the thing to live and breathe and go out in the real world and learn all about what it'll become someday. Thus was born semantic versioning.

On the other end of that, like what you're talking about, you have the artist who answers "how long did it take you to paint that?" with: "my whole life". I think this holds true in most disciplines and especially in software. The actual code that makes a thing work is trivial - but you have to know which of the 9 gazillion ways of doing it is the one you want, which only comes from experience.

1 - https://imgur.com/RadSf