What "Worse is Better vs The Right Thing" is really about

I thought about this one for a couple of years, then wrote it up, and left it untouched for another couple of years. What prompted me to publish it now – at least the first, relatively finished part – is Steve Yegge's post, an analogy between the "liberals vs conservatives" debate in politics and some dichotomies in the professional worldviews of software developers. The core of his analogy is ris