Cathedral and the Bazaar is something I use often to see which side of an argument I want to be on.

The central thesis is that Cathedrals evolve via a top-down design. An exclusive set of overseers who guard and direct the design of a thing from it’s conception. In software, you see this a lot - often bad, but sometimes good. Perhaps my go-to example here is golang - which is most often called Google’s language.

The Bazzars are more community driven. Someone sets up shop, another one joins in, and another - and you’ve got a large sprawling vibrant bazaar that’s demand-driven. Good ideas get bigger, bad ideas die out. It’s decentralised at its core.

Centralised planning requires a lot of “trust” in benevolent dictators. Of all the dictators, only a few are benevolent, and many run into the cronyism trap. It’s almost always worth your while to let multiple simultaneous shops open up and let the most efficient survive, even at the extra cost of exploration.