Comment by freedomben

> You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own.

From my anecdotal experience it absolutely is more fun (I yearn for the early days when this happened more), but it's also extremely inefficient and slow when you need to ship a product, and increasingly difficult when your code has to run on high-level platforms (like the web, mobile, etc). Building frameworks and re-inventing wheels is one of my favorite things to do, but it rarely makes business sense to do that unless you're in a very niche space.