I've always had the same mindset, which I think most pre-2000 coders share, and is likely a side effect of needing to develop within limitations. For one of man

I've always had the same mindset, which I think most pre-2000 coders share, and is likely a side effect of needing to develop within limitations. For one of many examples, early video games wouldn't have been possible without meticulously bespoke code, because the hardware limitations required extremely inventive strategies for storing and displaying graphics, compressing text used for dialogue, generating sound, etc. This was just as true for the web, even into the broadband years due to the new limitations of smart phones and mobile networks. But now that the bandwidth is massively available, we've abandoned all of those optimizations. Though, I think post-2000 it makes more sense to take the opposite approach to optimization. Let the generators do their work, and then edit the file to remove what you don't want. It takes a fraction of the time to cut a couple lines from a generated SVG than it does to create from scratch -- even one as simple as Derek's example.