Logotherapy

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. - Albert Camus

Most of the work in making a film, or a game, is iterative - constantly refining every aspect of it, tweaking and adjusting and refining all the details. If that process of iteration - the steps by which each aspect of the project is refined - is not itself refined, then this can be a tedious and labored process. The usual motivations for refining a pipeline are monetary - if you can shorten the iterative loop, you can get more loops (a better product) in the same amount of time, or a set number of loops in a shorter time: either of which increases the 'efficiency of improvement'.

Pipeline engineering is a kind of meta-aesthetic activity: the process of refining a process. But it can also have a huge aesthetic aspect - just like any tool can be made rough and clumsy, or refined and elegant. I've seen a lot of pipelines, a lot of workflows, that were inefficient or inelegant, usually in the name of expediency -that's not only a flawed way of thinking, it's downright inelegant.