Finally, a nuanced answer to my comment. This is exactly what I’m getting at. By the time you deal with the whole scope of the project, every little thing adds to the cost way out of proportion to just doing it. I can slap a 50A plug in, the code isn’t complicated, but if you don’t want to have a go around with an inspector, you pay an electrician exorbitantly to get the final result. When you get everyone on a project involved in getting that done, it’s several times the hundred dollars of the actual materials. Even if it’s just part of an initial project scope.

You start getting region-specific bullshit like EMT conduit for powerlines in the mix, and inspectors that will contradict themselves in the same sentence, and in the end, you’re paying $400-500/sf for putting up a house when 20 years ago it was $150-200. It’s gotten crazy, and so little of it makes an appreciable safety or efficiency difference anymore. Look at arc-fault breaker code now, these aren’t preventing any significant amounts of fires, but every breaker is 10X the cost of a normal breaker. And there are only a couple circuits that don’t need them now according to code.