[bluesnowmonkey]

> We're reinventing wheels at a prodigious pace[...]

What you see as waste, I see as valuable experience. In school, did you just read books and take tests? Or did you spend a lot of time solving problems that had already been solved, deriving equations you could have looked up, writing programs you could have downloaded...?

People learn by doing. You don't sit down and design the Next Big Language on your first try. You invent a lot of shitty, unoriginal little languages while simultaneously studying what's out there, and maybe eventually you get to the cutting edge where you can create something novel and better.