The cult of originality is reinforced by the current (psychotic) reliance of academia on papers, which, structurally, must be original to be considered significant.<p>Historically, tradition was more important than originality. Logically this makes sense: most new ideas are more likely to be bad than the current set of ideas, settled on in a somewhat darwinian manner.<p>In many fields the cult of originality isn't too damaging: you get a lot of useless "original" stuff that is quickly forgotten and discarded. Pointless and expensive, but ultimately of little importance.<p>Architecture, unfortunately, is an area where the cult of originality has done real damage to the actual, physical world. There are power stations built by anonymous journeymen in obscure parts of the US, using pattern books, with more architectural merit than much of the stuff built after WW2. We now put expensive lofts in what were once storage sheds in major cities, because they were built when tradition was still a functioning factor in building.<p>htmx, to an extent, is an example of something that mixes originality and tradition. It takes the traditional understanding of HTML and web development (itself an original idea!) and adapts that to AJAX.