Quoting Allen Holub

Found this piece by Allen Holub that makes the same point as the one I made in this post: design is all about trade offs.

Design, by nature, is a series of trade-offs. Every choice has a good and bad side, and you make your choice in the context of overall criteria defined by necessity. Good and bad are not absolutes, however. A good decision in one context might be bad in another. If you don't understand both sides of an issue, you cannot make an intelligent choice; in fact, if you don't understand all the ramifications of your actions, you're not designing at all. You're stumbling in the dark