That attitude is valuable in many cases and in many ways. And that specifically includes this forum. There's a lot of "applied philosophy" in systems development ("what do you mean by 'fast'" and "does a vehicle include horses"?).
The only thing I'll note is that customers can become hostile when asked to explain themselves; such twats dislike their ignorance being exposed ("it is obvious; just do it") and/or having their wooly thinking exposed.
I had one instance where per my standard practice I wrote up a 1 page requirement and gave it to the requester. I went back a couple of days later to discuss it. "I don't have time for that paper work." Not something I generally tolerate, but I let it pass. I had estimated it as 2 weeks work. So I went ahead with it. Meanwhile another guy across the hall from me was doing a very much simpler version of the same thing. Probably 1/4 of the effort or less. The math for what I'd been asked to do was complex and prone to instability. The complexity is just an extra day or so, but unstable equations can take days to develop a reliable implementation.
So two weeks after his dismissive comment about the 1 page specification he wanted the program. I told him, it's not finished. He's all in a lather because his project will be late, so I told him about Wen Long's simplified version and suggested he might be able to get by with that.
A couple of days later we have a very tense meeting in his boss' office. The two of them are all over my case.
"What's going on, You said two weeks work"
"I said two weeks effort. I didn't say it would be ready in 2 weeks. I have a lot of other people I support."
"I don't know if we can continue to use you."
blah, blah , blah
When I got back to my office, there was a message from my boss' secretary that he and his boss wanted to see me in his office right away. So I go down the hall expecting to be fired.
They wanted to see me to give me an award for the excellence of my work and how responsive I was to staff requests. I was never able to find out what had initiated it. I just solved the problems I encountered and looked for problems that might arise. I was a contractor, so the company award was rather unusual. The first guy's project was never completed as he found Wen Long's simplified version adequate.
The first guy did not like me. Previously he was buying a Linux cluster and I attended the meeting with the sales people and his boss. During the discussion I raised the issue of power consumption. This guy had a corner office with all glass walls in Houston. The sales people said it's not a problem. It runs on a regular 20 A 120 circuit. Problem was it dissipated about 1800 watts. They bought it and put it in his office. In 2-3 days they moved it to the computer room. After he'd been made to sweat for a few days
The most ironic part of the entire tale is his boss, who told me to my face at my interview that he didn't want to hire an oil industry programmer and who had hired a Indian outfit to develop a system for running jobs on workstations evenings and weekends became my primary client. I attended his weekly staff meetings. At one of these, during a vendor presentation one of them remarked that they were considering hiring some Indians. I was gob smacked when he said, "Well, you get what you pay for." or similar. All the work the Indians had done was discarded after burning through $100K or so at their cheap hourly rates.
I was returning to my office after visiting a senior seismic processor when two of the Indians called out to me. They had a problem. They needed to divert stderr from the programs they were running off hours to a file but couldn't figure out how to do it. The two of them had been trying all morning.
They showed me their code. They were calling dup(2), dup2(2) and a long list of other exotic Unix system calls. I was familiar with the calls and what they were used for but to this day have never encountered a reason to use them. Once they explained the task, I wrote a 5 line (lots of white space) program that wrote to stderr and another 5 line program that reopened stderr on a file and ran the first program. Compiled them, demonstrated it worked and left. They'd spent 8 man hours going nowhere. The entire demonstration took me 5 minutes. Even though I was being paid 3-4x what they were, I was still the lowest cost solution.
My career was unusual as I had been trained as a scientist, not as a programmer. I did not get my PhD because of personal conflicts with my supervisor and after 4 years at Austin, it was not worth going to Stanford and spending another 6. I'd also given myself a common law computer science PhD by buying and reading 80 ft of books. So even without my doctorate I still commanded first rate PhD rates. I also survived a lot of layoffs.
When I quit work to move to Arkansas to look after Mom & Dad I'd expected to get a job where I did most of my work at home and flew to Houston for 3-4 days once a month. The crash in 2008 killed that and I had a really tough time for several years until I stumbled across this forum. I find living in cyber space more than a bit weird, but the company here matches the company anywhere I ever worked professionally. This forum has completely changed my outlook on life. The trolls are annoying, but the only thing that comes close is Usenet back in the late 80's and early 90's when mention of a book or paper in a post was likely to get a response from the author.