I know this is in jest, but honestly there are two kinds of wheels: round things that everyone uses to roll around with in common/universal ways, and specific configurations of wheels like this person mentioned for microwave routing.

You probably don't want to reinvent the wheel that is SSL or UTF-8 or something ubiquitous like that, but there's actually not that much wrong with reinventing the way specific wheels are arranged and designed to work together in a domain-specific context like microwave routing (which I know nothing about). The act of reinventing it will probably teach you a lot about the domain itself, and depending on where you started in your journey, it can be quite fruitful (i.e. if you are a true beginner, then many of the lessons you learn will be things that are already common knowledge; if you are already a journeyman or expert, it's quite likely you might pick up some novel insights in the course of disassembling and reassembling the thing).