Unlike many, I don't correlate programmer ego inflation with re-invention. In acuality, re-invention is good. It leads to new ways of doing old things, often with either a performance boost, or usability increases, or just plain old security enhancements.
I do equate ego inflation with the need to display identifying markings on every artificial artifact that is created by human hands, a 'gopher waz here' kind of message.
This is usually harmless and serves as a good outlet for the disparaged youth that have turned to hacking for fun and profit, a kind of anger management that leads to no noticeable effects on the american economy.
But it does have a serious drawback in webapps when you tag all the shit you delivered with your unikeness: it leads to events like the dec 2004 phpbb worm, when automated google requests hunt down all users of some exact version of shit that is 'sploitable.
Notice how I haven't even begun talking about the fact that webapps are incredibly difficult to secure thanks to their inherent architecture... just think about all the elements that go into the typical webapp webstew...