Generic, by default, does not in any way make things more robust. We've gone from engineering solutions to meet specific problems to engineering solution frameworks that (supposedly) will solve the problem and allow for any unknowns. The problem is, no matter how hard the engineer tries, he can never anticipate the unknowns to the extent that the application framework can support all of them. We should go back to solving the specific problem at hand. In both scenarios you get the customer who wants a feature that absolutely doesn't fit with the current application, therefore a rewrite is necessary. And with the specific solution, you don't have nearly the man hours wasted.