[adrianratnapala]

One way to theorize about that experience is to note that the important argument for reuse is that changes only have to be made once to take effect everywhere. The classic change being the bugfix.

But the buried assumption there is that you actually want the change to happen everywhere. A hard thing to decide without hindsight.

[andrewflnr]

I like this. Perhaps the heuristic for refactoring redundancy should be not how many times you've written the code, but how many times you've made the same fix in multiple places.