Go work in industry: you'll find plenty of products or pieces of infrastructure that have been developed solely because a) there was no money for the best solut

Go work in industry: you'll find plenty of products or pieces of infrastructure that have been developed solely because a) there was no money for the best solution, b) best solution was open source and we can't use it (think finance, insurance, etc.) or c) someone thought they could do a better job. But I agree, it's very discouraging to work on something that isn't the first or you know there are very many of. First year in college, the first full-time group project we had was done by all the 200 other CS students at the college, in groups of 5. That's 20-30 groups all developing the same software according to the same 40 page requirements package. Oh, and they used the same project for 3-4 years. That's 120 solutions to the same essential problem and is very demotivating, even for students.