I disagree. Everyone should piggyback on the work done in the past until they need something different. Then with the beauty of open source, they can. Years ag

I disagree. Everyone should piggyback on the work done in the past until they need something different. Then with the beauty of open source, they can. Years ago, I worked with Symfony 1 under a start up brand. As the lead, I extensively re-engineered Symfony to the point where very little of it was left---the router, session software, configuration reader, caching mechanisms were completely changed, and the database ORM (Propel at the time) was extensively refactored. However, we were in the business of making a product, finding users, and delivering value---not the business of software architecture. As such, we waited till we hit a pain point in the software before modifying it. If we knew in advance that we needed something custom, we did so. If we didn't then we didn't practice NIH egotism just for the sake of calling ourselves "real coders(tm)".