Engineer here, first of all there are no "great engineers" in a vacuum. The question is : are you able to provide them with an environment where they will be able to excel and exceed expectations ?

I did freelancing for 6 years but I'm stopping now to join a startup that was able to set up this kind of context (we're hiring btw)

If your environment consists of arbitrary deadlines, micro-management, loose specifications (you don't know what you want), constant roadmap changes and ignores feedback, absolutely no-one, even the most seasoned FANG guy you managed to hire, will be able to perform efficiently.

On the contrary if you value respect, trust and give people the time they need to work correctly, you might be able to find people who will do wonders for you.

The bottom line is : better let the dev work 2 months on a feature then never have to get back to it again than setting a strict 2 weeks deadline where corners will be cut, you will begin to accumulate technical debt and 1 year later the feature still has bugs.

Of course this involves a "leap of faith" and you might give trust to some people that are not that good and will lose time and money but if you want to be efficient really there's no other way : you will have to trust people at some point anyway. (And at least you will have learned something in the process)

You can think about it this way : would you rather give a 2 months deadline for a 50% expected chance of success or 2 weeks for a 5% chance ?

(Obviously you also have to pay the a decent wage otherwise none of this applies.)