Peter Gabriel is a long-standing member of the Lisp community. (Lisp, as I have mentioned before, is a linguistic parent to Scheme.) In the late 1980's, he developed the idea that "worse is better" as part of his essay Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big. He later wrote a rebuttal to his own essay titled Worse is Better is Worse (PDF). The essays have a history unto themselves chronicled on the Wikipedia, which may or may not be trustworthy on this topic.