As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying - "Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been rediscovering those things every ten years since." I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and then others came around and wrapped things differently. It's not BAD to wrap things differently, but the old stuff had more of the sharp corners sanded off, and sometimes we lose that battle-hardened aspect when we rewrite code.