"Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish, just like grape." - Mr Miyagi

So much of software engineering (and life) is like this. You can do it one way or the other. Both work. But when you try something in the middle, you get the worst of both worlds.

While compromise can be good, sometimes it doesn't benefit us, because it forces us onto the middle road.

The next time you are tempted to compromise and come down somewhere in the middle, consider a different type of compromise: pick one way this time, and the other way the next. That way you can see which way is really best, without watering down your experiment.