> However, the lack of prior knowledge about pyp has given pypipe its own unique identity.

This is why I think it is not always bad to reinvent things. Reinventions can have their own advantages, often through a somewhat different focus. There can be value in creating (a prototype of) your own solution before you see how others have solved your problem. (Or even where others draw the line around your problem, which may be different from where you do and override it.) Reinventing and sharing something is also a reliable way to learn about prior art. :-)

However, you usually don't want to be the one doing the reinventing. :-) It is not the best use of one's time and resources. A better starting point is to know the state of the art well and have some disagreements with it.

Let me share a personal cautionary tale. It doesn't really apply to pypipe but may still be useful or interesting. I once took it too far with static site generators. In order to make it a learning experience, I deliberately avoided studying existing ones in depth. I wrote mine in a niche programming language with what I thought was a fresh perspective. (It kind of was. A big part of it was leaning heavily on an in-memory SQLite database.) I repeated the mistakes of early content management systems, like heavy indirection and too much code in templates. Soon my static site generator had users! And I was just realizing how flawed it was. Oh no. The users were few, but they used the generator for real things, like an event. Some knew about my wheel-reinventing approach and weren't dissuaded by it.

I found myself stuck with a subpar design to polish for the 1.0 release. When it was finished, I had to do a fairly difficult and only partial reworking for version 2.0. To encourage moving to the new version and not frustrate those with complex projects, I wrote a migration tool. The most serious projects based on the generator stayed on version 1.x.

So, I advise against going this far. It is probably best to do the research and learn about the state of the art first. I try to do it now.

Again, this is much less of a concern with pypipe. It doesn't create the same kind of user lock-in as a static site generator. At most, you will have to ask your users to upgrade their shell scripts when something changes.