> worthwhile software is usually novel.

Another type of worthwhile software is business CRUD. And unfortunately in my experience even for these mundane types of tasks time estimates are typically misjudged - for a multitude of reasons.

The typical reason is that developers in large teams often don't know all the places where a field may be used - and their IDE could very well miss some. So automated testing or QA finds an issue, and then the unaccounted-for, time-consuming bugtracking begins.

CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Delete. Basically just inputting and displaying data from a database.