In a true case of “worse is better,” the aging storage system technologies in use today are likely to carry forward into the foreseeable future. Sadly, general purpose, extreme-scale HPC will never reach the utopian data management paradise described in many visionary presentations; rather, the evolution of data management is a Sisyphean undertaking whose piecemeal advancements must begin at the bottom of the hill. Accepting this reality still leaves room to balance pragmatism and innovation though, and the 30 PB all-flash file system being deployed in NERSC’s Perlmutter system will be presented as evidence that this worse-is-better reality can still result in a file system that will be not only the fastest in the world but will work predictably and reliably on delivery.