Although sometimes treated like the "holy grail of the software industry" reuse has never appealed to me as a primary goal.
After I discussed this topic with Olli (sorry: no blog, no personal homepage => no link) last week he dug up the diploma theses from Rupert Stützle (in German) called "Wiederverwendung ohne Mythos" (roughly: "Reuse without myth") which puts a little foundation behind my gut feeling.
I've personally always considered reuse to be an indicator of good architecture and design but the real goal for me is to to have flexible systems where the change impact is as localised as possible. I'll have to take a look at the theses to see if that point of view is also backed up by hard facts.
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