Software is a very competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that gets software written faster and better will, all other things being equal, put its competitors out of business. And when you're starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your competitors will crush you.
Yeah we thought we were going quick. "Takes years for people to launch and we built a perfect system in a few months!" was kind of our approach. We literally just should have bought a theme, connected our backend, and launched, then iterated the moment we saw cash. Reading all the things in the world won't matter until you start or have some frame of reference for the things you read. Now our frame of reference is our past failure.
I dare say even if you'd done the quick solution you may well still have been crushed by the competitor with VC funding. It's a tricky business. I guess one of the advantages of going through YC is the companies then generally have access to funding more easily than their competitors.
You didn't read PG's essays [1] did you?
[1]: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html