Problems not worth fixing

I worked on a closed-source DBMS years ago and the development cycle was 1) code for 6 months 2) debug for 18 months. Part 2 was longer than part 1 because the customers have high expectations for quality and the product delivers on that. But it was also longer because some co-workers might not have been code complete after 6 months and were quietly extending part 1 into part 2.

I fixed many bugs during part 2. One that I remember was in the optimizer. Someone added code to detect and remove duplicate expressions (A and A and B --> A and B). Alas the algorithm was O(N*N). Analytics queries can have complex WHERE clauses and all queries were forced to pay the O(N*N) cost whether or not they had any duplicate expressions. 

The overhead for this feature was reasonable after I fixed the code but it raises an interesting question. Are some problems not worth the cost of prevention? Several times a year I see feature requests that make me think of this.

Forgot to add the bug that inspired this post. In bug 30342 there was a change in the MySQL 5.0 optimizer that added predicates which could increase the overhead for query optimization when more predicates means more calls to records_in_range.