I concur with >>10 regarding:

> My understanding of software development is that we should make things as general as possible so we can reuse our code.

The problem with making something as general as possible is that it becomes difficult to do anything with it. Your code should be as simple as is reasonable -- do not generalize until you have a real need for it.

The current codebase I'm working with was originally put together by a Java architectural astronaut, and it is quite flexible. The problem is that we don't need that flexibility. As we slowly chop out those parts the code is becoming both smaller and much easier to understand.

Also, reuse of code is a tad overrated. I've seen little reuse of code outside of libraries.