> Sure, don't build your system to keep audit trails until after you have questions to answer so that you know what needs to go in those audit trails...what matters is whether someone has specifically asked for that for this particular system yet.

I spent ~15 years in life sciences.

You're going to build an audit trail, no matter what. There's no validated system in LS that does not have an audit trail.

It's just like e-commerce; you're going to have a cart and a checkout page. There's no point in calling that a premature optimization. Every e-commerce website has more or less the same set of flows with simply different configuration/parameters/providers.

Going "what if?" and then validating a customer requirement that exists NOW is NOT the same thing as trying to pre-empt a customer's requirement which might exist in the future.

Audit trails are commonly neglected coz somebody didnt ask the right questions, not coz somebody didnt try to anticipate the future.