For me, the most important thing in this situation is coupling. The code implementing a feature may be an ungodly mess, but by minimizing its coupling to the rest of the system I make it easy to improve (or remove) later. I would much rather have messy and confusing code that is self-contained than an elegant abstraction with a large blast radius.
So I’m a little confused about why it sounds in this whole thread like we are vilifying refactoring without actually saying we are doing so. It’s weird.
Refactoring "up front" is what people are taking issue with. It's extremely rare to have a project where you know every requirement and they never change "up front" before writing any code.
Either Fowler’s 2nd edition made some pretty big changes I’m unaware of, or we are all using very different definitions of Refactor. Do you guys mean “redesign”? Because that’s a very different word from “refactor”.
No, I’m talking about the first time I write something. At that point in the game, my highest priority is to minimize the coupling between that code and the rest of the system (rather than, say, performance).
