Let me draw a comparison with the building trades. “Home Depot® did not become a gigantic company by selling good-quality stuff to people who know what they are doing.” You can take your own home and by-and-large do whatever you want to with it. If you need to hold something up, you can saw a couple of two-by-fours and whack together a little improvised saw-horse and no one other than yourself will see it. But a professional home-builder, who has done this hundreds if not thousands of times by now, will take a completely different approach. This person will build not only for the present but for the future, knowing not only (and much better than you do or even could) that the structure (s)he is building will last, but also anticipating what experience has taught might happen. Right down to building the thing upon a rock and not the shifting sand. There are building codes, inspection programs, and minimum materials standards which a professional will scrupulously follow, and not merely because the law requires it. The professional knows that (s)he is paid to know what the homeowner does not, and to build quality structures with the professional’s name on it. Professionals eat very well.
Over the past thirty years, I have myself spent a lot of my time ... in fact, the preponderance of it ... cleaning up after the work of the amateur, the “agile,” the arrogant, and most especially the unprepared. It is difficult work which I compare to that of the Red Adair well-fire fighting teams, and it should never have been that way. I suppose I should be grateful, though, that there probably will always be an endless supply of hacks who run a project straight into the ground and then jump ship. Those people have been good to me, although not to the then-desperate people who’ve engaged us.
