> If craftsmanship is measured by the long tail of good choices that give something a polished and pristine feel, then SQLite was built with none of it.

It apparently has an extensive and thorough test suite. That's an excellent design choice that tons of other projects could learn from, and is probably a key element of its success.

Sometimes a poorly-designed thing that is excellently-documented and thoroughly-tested is better than a brilliantly-designed thing that is lacking in those. In fact, unless the number of users of the thing is 1 (the creator), the former is likely a better option across all possible use-cases.

Perhaps we could generalize this by stating that determinism > pareto-optimality.