Yikes, that's bizarre. I don't even think the conclusions they draw are even correct: there are many solutions I build from scratch because they're easier to maintain. e.g. this morning I needed to fetch data from 3 APIs: google analytics, twitter, and soundcloud. I could have downloaded the PHP lib they bundled for each of them separately, read their docs, and pulled my data from those. Instead, I just looked up their API docs, found the endpoints I needed and fetched what I needed with libcurl. I think it's easier to implement and maintain 3 simple calls to curl than it is 3 different libraries. Conversely, there are many 'standard' solutions that perform quite well, e.g. underscore.js has many methods, such as its .each(), which often outperform their builtin counterpart.

Questions like that are like being asked if you prefer: A) A backhoe, because it gets the job done faster. B) A shovel, because you have finer control

without being told what it is that you're actually digging.