Yes, and not just hours of work, but reputation damage. Think of all the products out there where people say "but it sucks because it crashes for no reason sometimes." These are not reproducible crashes generally (as most developers can fix those), but rather bad developer decisions that led to a system that is hard to make bug-free due to the way it's structured. Even the decision to use a programming language without pointers can lead to fewer unexplained crashes, security vulnerabilities, etc.