I like the Franz story about NFS. The found it was easier to reimplement NFS from scratch rather than to figure out how to configure the commercial product. Bleeping NFS!

Sometimes it is quicker to write the exact thing you need rather than struggling with something that wants you to think it is the solution to your problem.

Another case in point was the Aha! moment someone described when realized that the Lisp Postgress interface was not going against the library but against the wire protocol itself. Just as easy.