Throughout the early development of Web3, financial systems were designed to be flexible instead of responsible. Money was quick, permissionless and experimental, but not usually as disciplined as the actual trade requires. These weaknesses could be overlooked as long as there was minimal usage. The cracks could no longer be concealed once the volume went up and businesses got involved in the space.
Plasma is constructed based on an alternate assumption. It begins by the notion that financial liberation does not consist in elimination of order, but in construction of it in the right way. Discipline is the thing that makes scale in the real world business. The businesses require systems that will act in a consistent manner day to day and in thousands of transactions without the need of human supervision.
This field is incorporated into the flow of payments through plasma. Settlement is not ad hoc but has its rules. The treatment of refunds is not as an edge case. Records of transactions are designed in such a way that they are easily identifiable and verifiable even several years after the execution. The latter method eliminates the necessity of manual control and substitutes the processes of trust with predictable implementation.
Besides, discipline alters the operation of the teams. When the finance departments have confidence on the payment layer, then no balance checking will occur. When compliance teams have regular time stamping and purified records, audits are proactive rather than responsive. The easier planning can be done when the operations teams are aware that the payment behavior will not be altered by some sudden event. The infrastructure behind plasma makes this stability a silent operation without subjecting businesses to learning the blockchain complexity.
The interesting fact about the approach of Plasma is that it does not position the concept of discipline as a constraint. Discipline is instead the pillar, which facilitates confidence. Encoded rules amend uncertainties into risks because they are eliminated by systems that encode clear rules. This eventually lowers the strain of operation and growth is able to occur without friction all the time.
I believe that Plasma is more of a change in attitude towards experimental finance to responsible infrastructure. When the Web3 is in its maturity phase, the ones that will gain long-term trust will be projects that focus on discipline over novelty. The design of plasma itself indicates that it realizes this change and is developing to last long as opposed to paying attention to short term survival.