The people who taught you to architect programs before coding were also aware of this trade-off.

It's a lot easier to write the small programs assigned in college that way, than the large programs you will write in the real world.

This is not the top-down vs. bottom-up debate; both top-down and bottom-up design architect first.

It is related to the concept of waterfall/iterative/incremental design; incremental designers can paint themselves into a corner.

I've written a lot of big programs, and I've never regretted the time spent architecting them. I have sometimes wished I had spent more time designing them before starting.

Fatal design errors that crop up down the road are more likely to be language-related: Your program gets so complicated that you have to rewrite it in a compiled language to run it in real-time or to avoid running out of RAM; or you discover that C++ templates don't work as advertised, or that Java can't allocate 2G of RAM, after you've already writtten 3000 lines.