Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being willing to throw away work is the single most effective way I've seen at running an engineering org, both in terms of promoting innovation and in being able to quickly adapt to evolving customer needs as they get revealed. If your morale is harmed by throwing away work, that's something you should work on.
This is something I've come across in my own experience. If you don't actually have any experience in the problem space, the best thing you can do is make something that just barely works, then scrap it. Then all the unknown unknowns become known unknowns and you can actually create good solutions to it. All planning is a waste if you don't even know where the speed humps will lie.
If that's the place where someone is, they should be conferring with someone else who knows something instead of trying to fly solo
Blindly going through problem spaces is how you waste your life taking wrong approaches