I think you have a really good point that with the cost of developer time being what it is and its upwards trend, anything to reduce that (planning, using less-expensive or more-efficient resources to do the planning, etc.) is going to be getting a strong look.

I am not sure if Waterfall is the answer to this problem or not. I don't think Agile has proven to be. Agile has benefits for sure, but saving money is *not* one of them. I've been using low-code/no-code tools for over a decade, and I feel sure that they are part of the solution, but not the entire solution.

What I *do* know, is that taking the time to write a technical detail user story, one that says stuff like "get data from this table joined to that table with these conditions, filtered like so, then populate the list on the screen with them..." (ie pseudocode) goes a long, long, LONG way to discovering holes in user stories, helping to see what the technical difficulties are, and so on. I think that pseudocode is very much a lost art, and many of the problems I see in the development process could have been avoided by writing pseudocode up front.

J.Ja