Reusing code - your own or someone else's - often turns out to be a mistake. Reimplementing functionality also often turns out to be a mistake. Either way peopl

Reusing code - your own or someone else's - often turns out to be a mistake. Reimplementing functionality also often turns out to be a mistake. Either way people get fooled by 80% solutions. There's no simple answer to this. I can give a simple algorithm - look at how much time you'll spend on each vs. where it's most important for you to spend your time - but you still have to apply that algorithm to your own data set to know which choice is right. And sometimes you'll get a wrong answer, and it'll be annoying (as appears happened in the OP's example). That's why they pay us the big bucks.