Recently ran across a talk by John Seddon where he talked about trying to do the wrong thing righter.
It made me wonder if we do similar things in software development. Are we getting better at doing the wrong things? Something like the XML RPC specification that was improved to make the Simple Object Access Protocol specifications, known as SOAP under auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This lead to the need to have tools to write and validate XML Schemas, leading to 1000+ line WSDL files that describe the SOAP end points.