I guess this is what's being lost in translation. I've read oodles of your posts over the years, here and there (the other place), and I've pretty much always agreed when you start talking about how we shouldn't feel straitjacketed to the write to market, commercial approach. But I just can't agree that the only way to make a book better is to take a pen to it and start fiddling.
Sometimes, once a book is done, it's the best is can be and messing with it is going to do nothing but turn it into a shadow of what it could have been, because a book is more than a collection of sentences and paragraphs. It has energy. Once you start fiddling, it's very easy to screw that up. New authors would be best served IMO to be very cautious of edits and revision. It can take a passable or a good book and make it terrible. It can take a great book and make it mediocre.
Apparently, writing is hard.
And I agree; it’s super easy to ruin a book in editing, to lose our voice, or the thing that made it special or worth writing in the first place. It's why I'm always saying that writers should find an editor (not proofreader) who gets what they're doing.
But...
The first draft is almost never the best version of anything. Some poetry...some musical recordings...but exceedingly few.
For example (and I've seen this), a book showing someone ordering liquor from a bar and the author makes no never mind as to what it is they're ordering. Sometimes it's described as amber or just a bottle of something. Liquor, what we drink and what we don't, is extremely personal, opinions formed over years of both good and bad experiences. That's character development. But you might not know for sure what this new character, someone you're just meeting, likes to drink when you begin writing the book, but, by the end, you will. So you go back and add that little bit in. And if you go back and do that all over the place, with character, mood, setting and action sequences, your world begins to really take shape, your characters become three-dimensional. Your book gets better. If we go back with a global perspective, we can improve pacing, tighten the suspense...dial up the excitement.
In art...we revise, rework and refine.
In design...we revise, rework and refine.
In cinema...we revise, rework and refine.
In music...we revise, rework and refine.
In traditional literature...we revise, rework and refine.**
This isn't just a best practice, it's pretty much the way creative stuff is done.
So...when it comes to Indie books, I don't see them as special. To get our best, we need to revise, rework and refine just like everybody else. Now, how to go about it, and how 'best' is best enough - that's an individual thing.
**The most well-known example I can think of where this was not the case is Kerouac's On the Road, typed out on a single 120' roll of paper. Responding to Kerouac at the time, Capote called it typing, not writing. But he was wrong, because the story is apocryphal. Contrary to myth, Kerouac spent six years,
spontaneously, revising and editing multiple drafts before publication.
eta: I believe it's impossible to know the breadth and depth of a novel, to know it’s themes and nuance before it's written, even if you outline, so we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I really do believe that the only way to get our best work is to, through one process or another, refine it.