When considering how to progress this stage of the project,

While there are certainly times when it’s appropriate to take a shortcut and just glob some additional functionality on top of what’s already there, I’ve universally found that such code inevitably becomes a curse on future developers.

When you add up the sharp edges that impact customers, the increased cost in developer time, the rise in defect counts, the churn of staff, and so on, it soon becomes clear that it’s smarter to take the time to properly integrate.

Of course, if there’s an industry conference, legislative deadline or some other immovable deadline looming, then by all means take the shortcut required to make things happen on time - but don’t forget to circle back and clean things up afterwards.

It might be difficult and expensive to fix things now - but it isn’t going to get easier or cheaper with the passage of time.