Sounds to me a lot like people that have a narrow and shallow level of experience in the field they are diving into, so they keep bumping into the walls.
Dev: I had this great idea of making this new thing because I haven't seen it before
Everyone Else: Yeah, it looks like this or this or even that. Have you looked at what other people have done and the pain points they solve or cause?
Dev: Nah, this is a totally different idea that nobody's done before.
As a graphics professional who loves node-based workflows, I find the constant re-invention of the wheel pretty painful. With some coordination of this effort, Blender or Natron could be real open-source challengers to Nuke, but starting from scratch seems always to be more enticing.
The reinvention of the wheel with nodes is truly difficult to watch.
There are also very close cousins like Reason and its rack connections, which could contribute some nodes-101-level concepts to most basic graphical node workflows.
Dev: I had this great idea of making this new thing because I haven't seen it before
Everyone Else: Yeah, it looks like this or this or even that. Have you looked at what other people have done and the pain points they solve or cause?
Dev: Nah, this is a totally different idea that nobody's done before.
Everyone Else: Oh, okay, you do you then
*I've been that dev (more than once)