Why not to build a cathedral if someone else is paying?

I've never seen companies where developers are rewarded for performance improvement or any kind of improvement. Did an improvement? Nice! Good job! And that's it.

The point is, you build a shack so you can build a cathedral where it’s warranted. If you are stuck maintaining a cathedral you can’t move on to bigger better things.

Yep, you build a shack and charge the users the price of a starbucks latte per month because "it's just a starbucks latte".

Then you wonder why the solo founder saas has no customers.

I'm not sure what you're talking about; but what I was trying to say is I tend to see teams get charged with building X (which should be a cathedral), but then build a cathedral of configuration parsing, and a cathedral of CRUD; instead of focusing on X.

I like my job security large, ornate and full of stained glass.