Is rewriting everything from scratch obviously better than forking some other existing forum software (e.g. Discourse) and adding features?
That of course depends on how much that "other existing forum software" is complicated, and how many features need to be changed to fit our needs.
To answer your question, it is not "obviously better"; you just have to make a probabilistic estimate. Sometime people make the mistake of reinventing the wheel, when a good (or even superior) version already exists. But sometimes also people spend a lot of time investigating existing options, only to find out that all of them have some major problem. (And this process can also cost a lot of t...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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