What a great quote. It's from the book “Positioning”, but not from the authors - they mention a certain colonel that kept this on his office wall.
If I had a penny for every situation where this was appropriate, I'd be a rich man. There is an enormous difference between working on something from scratch and working on an established base/framework.
After many, many iterations the picture starts to become quite clear. More often than not if you just look at the solution it might seem deceptively simple. But the road to it might have (and usually is) been extremely tough.
Don't try to estimate the problem based on someone's solution. Don't underestimate someone's effort based on the (simplicity of) solution alone.
If you want to really get a good estimate on how complex a problem is, try solving it yourself (even roughly) without looking at existing solutions.
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