Josh,
There's no disagreement. I'm definitely in type #1 and yes, in order to
get a good abstraction, you do need to spend time and resources. A
project directed to a single customer seldom (almost never) have that
luxury. An ISV who wants to please as large customer base as possible,
might. The latter is also true for people like myself who deal with
tools and infrastructure aimed primarily towards ISV's and organisations
that do their own development.
Kind regards,
Thomas Hallgren