You're right of course, like the first time you hit a race condition (with a week of debugging) and build a distributed lock system. You publish it and people find it useful!

Only to realize later postgres offers fine locking capabilities far beyond what you've created (now that you get it).

Then you realize that all anybody is doing is creating subsets of Erlang (half serious). So why aren't we all using that?

In the grand scope, is it really a bad thing?

We end up with X ways to solve problem Y and you never know X + 1 could have some advantages. Exploration should be encouraged IMO!