Let's say you're writing a new web service in Java, because it has features aplenty and is also the language your team is most familiar with. You're confident the JVM is a platform you want to build on.
Now you need to:
1. Choose a set of libraries or a framework. Do you go for Spring or Java EE, or for something newer like Play or Dropwizard?
2. Choose a build tool. Maven? Ant? Gradle? Maybe we'll write some scala, so SBT?
3. Choose tools for deployment, config management, etc.
4. A database.
5. And so on.
All of these tools have different trade-offs. There are so many trade-offs that I don't think blog post comparisons (or whatever) cut it. And so you have the "magpies" who try and figure out some of these trade-offs for themselves by experimentation. (That is what, in my opinion, hack days and 20% time are for, not your new production system.)
But don't listen to me, we wrote our new web service in Go ;)
More seriously, it was a major decision and I couldn't possibly write a few hundred words on my blog to justify it. I may write a few thousand, though.