The trade-off isn't about the dangers of not refactoring v.s. refactoring. The trade-off is about time plus the aspect this article hammers, which is lack of knowledge about the future--i.e. if you made a multi-purpose multi-client framework to start with you might still be building things and rewriting them to fit them into even more unforeseen situations instead of having live code running for 100 clients.
* If you want to copy a site 100 times, go for it. But I know very few that ever thought that was a great idea, and each time it was a very specific case. Yes there are client-specific features and multi-tenant sites, but that's not what he said. He said "copy vs. abstraction" which is the opposite of refactoring.
As an aside, I'm really having trouble understanding how people in the HN community could be thinking I'm wrong on this.
I think I need to go to a forum that's more grown-up if this is how things are here now.
