I find it fascinating that elsewhere on this thread somebody expressed the opinion that "overengineering ... kills more projects than anything else" and here you express the opinion that a much worse problem is engineers bailing out after running up technical debt. To be honest, I really can't say which is worse, I've had to cope with both of them from other people. All I can say is that my tendency is to overengineer.
Like I said, I think it's a false dichotomy. Most over-engineered projects I've seen also had ridiculously sloppy code. Over-engineering usually concerns design. Sloppy coding usually concerns implementation. The code at a different stage of development, so it's possible to have both or neither.
