This reminds me of LivingSocial. For years, LivingSocial was like a mini black hole of really good startup-like talent in the DC area.

But when you have that many smart people under one roof, you have to keep them busy. So you get these kinds of reinventing-a-beautiful-wheel projects. Not knocking the quality, just knocking the growing distraction and temptation to build in-house rather than use existing tech.

LivingSocial had such good quality output, but they were all over the place. They had to keep all those productive people busy after all. And the best way was to keep churning out new products.