[computerslol]

It's a big industry out there. There are those who make bespoke products, and those that take a number of pre-built more general purpose libraries and just stitch them together, and everything in between.

Stitching together libraries is easy and generally quick to produce an initial product, but can become difficult to maintain/extend and is wasteful on both run-time and development resources. This method is pretty forgiving to those that don't know exactly what they are doing, and you don't have to have any experts on your team to produce a "working" product. You will accrue lots of technical debt this way (but in a lot of projects is doesn't matter much).

Bespoke products are difficult to architect and build (properly), take a long time to develop, but are performant, malleable and predictable when done right. If you do it wrong (or your architect is hit by a bus), you have a huge mess on your hands.

Most of my experience has been about two thirds bespoke, one third stitching. In my experience, finding the right ratio depends on the amount of scaling the product needs to do, how much you're willing to spend on talent, how unusual your requirements are, and how screwed you're comfortable being if things go wrong.

I have never seen an instance where a well built bespoke product did not have a competitive advantage over a stitched one. Generally a large competitive advantage. I have also seen a number of poorly built bespoke products crash and burn; so take that as you will.