I get what you mean. However other comments raised some valid points too. It's just a few hours of works . I think what matters a lot more is when these kind of anticipated features do not add up to constant gains (which in your case, setting aside the fact that this senior engineer rolled back your tactful additions, would be the time it takes to run the prod DB migrations, since this is what differs between your early and late implementation). More often than not an architectural choice will impact n features orthogonally with respect to other potential features. If it takes you 2 days of work to implement that particular transversal feature, the time it will take you to implement it across all "base" features will be 2n days of work. Stuff like class inheritance will allow you factor that into, say 2 days + 10n minutes. I witnessed disasters because of situations like this where stuff that would have taken me days to implement (or even hours) took 6 months. And the main reason for this is that another team was tasked with doing this, and they didn't know that part of the code base well, which, because everything had to be super "simple" ("easy" would fit better), no class hierarchy, everything super flat, each base feature taking up thousands of lines across several microservices in the hope that anybody could take over, was a slow, dreadly, soul crushing job. Members of the previous team said it would have taken them 2 weeks (because they had a long experience with the spaghetti dish). I re-implemented the program at home in a weekend (took 3 month to code): the required change would have taken me an hour to code, and a fews day of integration to change those n base features (but because I had a leetcode-complex, very expressive architecture, and knew the domain very well). It took the new team 6 months. 6 months ! And I think they only managed to implement one feature, not all of them.
Result: disgruntled senior employees quitted and were replaced with juniors. 3 month later, overtime was distributed across the tech department, killing the laid back 4-days week culture that was put in place to attract talents, the employee unionized, some more quitted, and about a year later, upon failing to hire back these productive elements, the COO was fired.
Result: disgruntled senior employees quitted and were replaced with juniors. 3 month later, overtime was distributed across the tech department, killing the laid back 4-days week culture that was put in place to attract talents, the employee unionized, some more quitted, and about a year later, upon failing to hire back these productive elements, the COO was fired.