I just started getting into open source projects mainly for the learning experience. I've made a few tiny contributions to some small projects. Most of my time has been spent just reading over other people's code and trying to understand how it works.

Often times I find myself frustrated by a lack of documentation and unit tests. There are also times where I think I can see a more intuitive solution to a problem, but implementing it would require large restructuring of code. I see all this and wonder to myself why I don't just start clean on the whole thing by myself and do things "the right way"? I'd also enjoy the experience of building it from scratch, as it would force me to learn skills that I might not learn by working on other people's code.

On the other hand, working on other people's code is also a great experience because it requires me to understand and work with other people's code and collaborate with them. It's just harder, IMO.

Thoughts?