There are times when the wheel at hand is an ill fit or perhaps there genuinely is a better way to do things Ex: Libressl. And so the wheel needs reinvention.
Reinvention of the wheel, reimplementation of a paradigm or some other repetition in a slightly different or totally different way isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the underlying concepts are well understood and it is executed with competence. I still believe malicious tampering is unnecessary when carelessness - or tiredness - on the part of the developer will do just as well.
I'm not sure that you can use LibreSSL as an example of something that is a "genuinely better way to do things", given that it's an essentially brand new project. There are reasons to believe it's a better way to do things, but we won't know how well it performs until there's time for people to start trying to exploit it.
Reinvention of the wheel, reimplementation of a paradigm or some other repetition in a slightly different or totally different way isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the underlying concepts are well understood and it is executed with competence. I still believe malicious tampering is unnecessary when carelessness - or tiredness - on the part of the developer will do just as well.