> we can't abstract away everything we do multiple times

I think there's a fundamental truth about any code that's written which is that it exists on some level of specificity, or to put it in other words, a set of decisions have been made about _how_ something should work (in the space of what _could_ work) while some decisions have been left open to the user.

Every library that is used is essentially this. Database driver? Underlying I/O decisions are probably abstracted away already (think Netty vs Mina), and decisions on how to manage connections, protocol handling, bind variables, etc. are made by the library, while questions remain for things like which specific tables and columns should be referenced. This makes the library reusable for this task as long as you're fine with the underlying decisions.

Once you get to the question of _which specific data is shown on a page_ the decisions are closer to the human side of how we've arbitrarily chosen to organise things in this specific thousandth-iteration of an e-commerce application.

The devil is in the details (even if you know the insides of the devil aren't really any different).