In my experience even when you want to do those things more often than not it's management that sees it as a waste of time and wants you to get to coding. So many times we've had to "pivot" in projects because management couldn't be bothered to let us plan any architecture.
I think this is the failure of the project leaders to incorporate usability into the discussion from the outset. It takes a strong will to sit there and say "We can build you what you want, but without at least one pass on usability and optimization, it's going to be fat, slow, and the end users are going to hate it."
