Keeping Up with the Jones's

First I clicked on a link in a comment http://www.2dolphins.com/ (it really does drive traffic to your site when you post a link) and ended up checking out links to life hack sites: http://www.lifehack.org/, http://www.lifehacker.com/, and http://toomuchimagination.blogspot.com/2007/02/sms-to-do-lists.html. Next thing I know I'm on a site called "twitter" where someone was working on a WP layout so I lurked to see what they were up to and they mentioned 3 things I wasn't familiar with so of course I had to know what The Style Archive, Open ID, and Habari are.

The thought I'm having lately:
It seems like a waste to design something from scratch with all those templates sitting around? Please tell me I'm wrong. And lazy.