With so much (healthy) competition, it’s important for startups to be innovating at the sharp end. We’ve got to focus on the tiny bit of technology that’s unique to our product and innovate around that. With such a small team (there’s 2 of us), any time we spend doing stuff that’s been done before effectively lessens our chances of differentiating our idea from the thousands of others being developed at the same time. I agree with you Alex on the two-tier system. Even those who have CS degrees need the basic stuff to get easier so we can concentrate on the hard bit of our app. We all waste time on the poly-fills in the same way that 5 years ago, we used to waste time on hacks for non-complaint browsers.

I commented this on Alex Russell's blog 'Infrequently noted':
http://infrequently.org/2012/08/inadmissible-arguments/comment-page-1/#comment-239938