Absolutely. In fact, I interviewed a guy last week that comes from very big tech and he basically himself admitted that they're basically wasting time and money chasing unknown "ideal" codec while almost always those projects hit dead end. He loves the money, I am sure, but he wants out anyway. :)
I've been to a project where, because the development and "hardening" budgets were separate, we knowingly pushed out buggy code so that we could take advantage of the latter.
Had I known that half of the job would be to game the system, I wouldn't have joined.
