I don't think NIH counts as NIH when you have a very clear and justifiable rationale. The best projects document their rationale and provide a direct, unbiased comparison to allow developers to make a better decision on which to use, as you have. The worst (and true NIH) projects pretend that the original project does not exist or document a biased comparison without acknowledging the points that are subjective.

There is one improvement I'd make. Your story here (spent hours debugging and filing bugs; spending the same amount of time rewriting got you further) is the most convincing reason to me. I'd document this in your comparison!

Exactly; NIH syndrome refers to the fact that it wasn't invented in house /being/ (or tainting) the rational.

Edit: replace failed attempt at italics...

I doubt that many people say with a straight face "I rebuilt it because I didn't write the original", even if that's the real reason: there is always an excuse.

Perhaps the other 9/10ths of the code implement the other 20% of the features?*

* Half joking.

I think roughly 40% of the remaining code implements the last 20% of the features, and the other 50% is just random bloat.

Request has a lot of extra code to deal with the global state. It's written as one giant class that sets all of its properties on itself (e.g. this.method = options.method, etc., etc., followed by "http.request this"). Further, when it handles HTTP redirects, rather than instantiate a new instance of itself or something it just calls its init method a second time and has to make sure that it resets all of its properties to their default state (e.g. this.method = 'GET'). This is where most of the bugs come in, as well as most of the bloat.

In contrast, our's is a method that calls itself again with new options based on the context when it needs to handle HTTP redirects so we don't need to worry about that sort of stuff.