Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is indeed a fine line between NIH and minimalism. They have a strong correlation. You have to compromise between unnecessary features/bloat/crap or simply do it yourself. It's often surprising how easy it is to make something from the scratch. Hence NIH.
It's not that fine a line. There's tons of space in the middle and I find a steady supply of coworkers who love to write code and hate to use libraries who never bother to understand half of what the libraries they do use are capable of. I may be slightly unusual in my habit of trying to find new uses for the tools we already have, but I'm not abnormal. This is something mature people should be doing as a matter of c…
Certainly, though, it's disastrous to assume that some existing library/product/whatever is going to be superior to home-grown, just because a lot of people use it, there's a big company behind it, or etc. That piece of software was written to cover a certain area of design and business space, and that may not intersect very well with the design and business space you need covered.
For myself, I do start with the hope that I'll be able to avoid writing some big chunk of code (by using some existing piece of software). But I'm very wary, as external software comes with costs, even if it's "free".