Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. The reason we can build such

Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. The reason we can build such complicated applications in such a small amount of time is partly because we're relying on other people to make default, sensible tradeoffs - a framework supporting a particular type of SQL database, or NoSQL, or PHP or Django or whatever it might be. The mental effort of analysing all the tradeoffs of doing something one particular way (with such a wide range of possible options) for every little decision rapidly gets overwhelming. Of course it's worth doing a bit of research (which often ends up being "read someone else's blog" for bigger decisions, but unless you're willing to spend 2 months building a prototype application in each of Ruby, Django, PHP, and whatever other fun new JS framework du jour there is, it's perfectly valid to go for the path of least resistance and hope it doesn't cause you too many problems in the long run.