I believe that this is the ol' generalization vs. specialization argument. There are devs who only do e-commerce sites. They have a bag of tricks and keep up on new tricks and know how to leverage stuff that's out there. But ask them to build anything else and they'll fall over. They also don't care about maintenance because they can knock these things out so fast, that any major change would be best handled with a quick re-write and it ultimately costs less.

On the other hand, I'm guessing that you, like most of us, are a generalist. We may not be able to build a highly specific, low-cost specialized site cheaply, but as complexity mounts and features and maintenance start mounting, we quickly earn our keep and the specialist can't keep up.

That's a good point, Chad. I think the problem arises when someone needs something out of the norm, but expects the cost to be the same as the boilerplate stuff. I imagine one of two things will end up happening. I'll either go ahead and dig deep on the e-commerce front and get a really solid codebase that I can reuse, or I'll have to go after a different crowd, the established businesses that can pay a bit more for something specifically tailored to their needs. Thanks for the feedback!