[tiagogm]

In my experience AB testing has a time and place - and that is after a certain level of traffic load and product/feature maturity and only to "validate" certain hypotheses.

For low volumes of traffic AB testing would takes ages to wield significant results and for products still maturing and shaping there is lot of "wisdom of crowds" data already available to help make decisions faster (ie: do you really need an AB test to know offering timely promotion to users helps convert?)

If you got a young product trying to grow, fast, it's a lot more effective to rely on experienced product people and off-the-shelf simple analytics to iterate quickly and to take some bets so one day you get to a point where AB testing "optimisations" starts to make sense.

It's a quite an interesting topic! I agree with you too - A/B test driven sites tends to culminate in terrible "cumulative experience" for users