A company in town, employed a guy I know (the one who turned me on to Perl and mod_perl, in fact) as their lead programming guy/systems architect. This friend of mine loved rolling his own everything ... and I mean everything. He rolled his own template system, DBI wrapper, you-name-it, making a bunch of Apache::Registry scripts.

And his life for a time was good.

Then came the day his dofteare ran right into a performance wall.

Long story short, his superiors installed a guy over him with better software architecture chops and they redid all his work with improved design and yes, standard modules in common use wherever they could.

It was the focus on having the fun of rolling his own over paying attention to the overall context and design of the software he was building that did him in.

IMO, the ability to not have to roll around in the nitty gritty of implementation details and spending more time looking at the overall problem is a gift from the gods.