>>Watch "Trading Places" sometime ... that's my point.
>
>If you mean "Trading Spaces", they have a $1000 limit :-)

Yes, thanks ... and that was where this thread started, with a "small" project.

As you, I would not "wing" it, if we were dealing with something "significant"; but for 10 or 20K, I have no problem with taking the "Trading Spaces" approach. With many clients, and a smaller budget, you can rapidly consume the budget and never produce anything if you take the "classic" approach. Assuming that boredom or change doesn't kill everything first.

I've worked from specs that were nothing more than: "We need a Work Orders system that can produce these x reports". "Fine, I can do it for $20,000. Sign here".

(That one evolved into a $300,000, 7 year part-time ERP project because they liked what I did with "Work Orders" ... and I still never produced a single spec).