> If someone spends a week or two writing a patch and you come in and rewrite it in an evening, that, in and of itself, is telling me something: You think your teammate is a worse coder than you, given you were able to solve it with "cleaner" code. You assumed that your solution was better, without talking to the person who authored it to see if they did things that way for a reason.

The time they spent developing the solution is a sunk cost. The only thing that should matter is whether the afternoon rewriting it is the most productive use of your time.

Also, rewriting something is far easier than writing it from scratch. Just because you can rewrite it quickly doesn't mean the original developer didn't save you a bunch of time by letting you see a workable first pass.