Let me clarify a bit on this whole wheel reinvention thing... This is a painfully common issue we have to deal with in theatre all the time... Not quite in the same way as I mentioned below, but that plays a part...
Much of this stems from the fact that theatres are basically poor... Not poor in quality, poor financially... However, the people involved in theatre are almost always widly read, highly creative, highly motivated, and generally highly intelligent... What that leads to is sort of a situation of champagne tastes on a beer budget...
I'll pursue this from the scene shop perspective for the moment... Perhaps I'll do it from lighting later...
Now, since we're poor, we have to be creative, which is good since most of us are... The designer provides a design... The designer does not provide instructions on how to make that design... The best analogy is to architects and engineers... Architects draw pretty pictures, and make fabulous models... The engineers get stuck figuring out how to actually make the building... In the shop though, if you are affiliated with a specific theatre, you also often have to try to fit a given design in to a given budget... In my case its a little easier since I simply tell the designer what something costs, and they have to make changes or cut units to fit the budget... But back to the first version of a shop... Once you get the design and its approved, you are often stuck figuring out how to actually do it, as well as stay in budget...
Let me give you an example... I did a show some years ago when I just moved in to this area, and it was very early in my career in professional theatre... I was working for a theatre on the shop staff. The design came down approved, and we had to make it happen... In this case, the entire set had to travel up and down stage around 15 feet... The set was basically an old house or apartment, so there was a living room, kitchen, and offstage a bathroom, front hallway and bedroom... The offstage areas weren't flushed out much, but they had associated platforms, doors, and flats... All this boiled down to a big steel truss deck that everything had to ride on... I recall a conversation with the TD at the time where I suggested that we had to get new casters due to the loads... Unfortunately we couldn't afford new casters, so we used the old cheap ones hanging around the shop... We borrowed some electric motor traction drives from another theatre, bolted them on the back of the deck, and we were off to the races... One problem though...
That conversation I had with the TD about the casters?... Turns out I was right... The old casters simply were not up to carrying the load... Naturally we didn't discover this until the set was in the theatre... The problem was that when the casters didn't move for a period of time, they went from being round, to being egg shaped... The traction motors didn't have enough traction or power to force the casters to spin once egged, but given a good pull or push, they would rotate, and become circles again... It took me forever to figure this out, because they would call, I would go out, give the deck a little push, and then it would run back and forth as long as I was there... It only seemed to be an issue when I wasn't there... Now if we had big stagehands on staff, they could have given it a push, and it would have been fine, but we didn't... So what we ended up doing was an elaborate rigging system that involved sand bags and pulleys... The sandbags would get hoisted up in the air by the traction motors while they moved the set, since once the wheels were round the motors were plenty strong... When the wheels egged, the sandbags would provide the extra pull to get the unit rolling again, and the motors would pull up a different set of sand bags to give a pull in the other direction...
Bottom line?.. Well in that case we basically reinvented the wheel... We didn't have the money to do it right, so we did that nightmare rigging solution since we had the rope, pulleys, and sandbags, and most importantly we had the creativity to overcome the issue...
There are probably hundreds of times I've done some reinventing... There will be more in the future to be sure...
The problem is we get so used to doing this, that sometimes, as indicated below, we forget that someone beat us to the punch, and we end up costing tons more time, money, and effort... I would like to think I'm very careful not to get trapped that way... Usually, I'm pretty successful... Sometimes I find myself down on the shop floor with a chisel and a chunk of rock trying to make it round though so to speak...