Those of us who have been through software development, or sat through a software engineering course, learned about many different software development models: Waterfall, Iterative, etc. Larry Wall, the creator and "chief programmer" for Perl came up with a new one when asked "What criteria mark the closure of perl6 specification?"
It seems you are presuming a Waterfall model of development here. We're not doing the Waterfall, we're doing the Whirlpool, where the strange attractor whirls around with feedback at many levels but eventually converges on something in the middle. In other words, a whirlpool sucks, but the trick is to position your whirlpool over your intended destination, and you'll eventually get there, though perhaps a bit dizzier than you'd like.
I'm sure we'll see it in all the major text books in a few years.
