Given from what he has written in Revising Attitudes, Mr Dethier, by saying “for most of us reason the only road to success,” meant that in most cases people need to revise in order to get their work to an acceptable level. He uses a metaphor early in the text, that less proficient students learn that revising is the only way in which they can achieve an A. Additionally, he mentions that the few people who can get by without revising actually do so continuously, in their minds.
Personally, I absolutely agree with him. But for the sake of the way I view things, I must highlight that revision can range from anything from grammar and spelling to a rehash of the main idea of the text.
I personally dislike explaining complex ideas with the aid of every day metaphors or similes, for stylistic reasons. I only do it when the use of these metaphors would result in achieving a clear objective such as increasing my own understanding of the idea its describing. In this case, I hope it achieves that. But, I’ll do it because it is the task. A partial metaphor I have for revision is art. One can change it endlessly, but it will never be objectively worse or better than before. It will simply be different, unless and only unless, you’re using a sort of benchmark or standard to qualitatively measure the change such as if it is better from an ease-to-understand standpoint.
“A piece of writing is never finished.” The previously mentioned metaphor is a good way to examine this view from. Writing, due to its inherent nature, is not something you can reach a certain point with and proclaim perfection—unless there’s a specific task associated with it, and even then only maybe. Writing is a never ending set of words that can have endless combinations and achieve endless layers of meaning. You can never finish it. But, you can get awfully close to using it for a specific something, and that is a final draft.