Asklemmy

As with so many things, it depends on your goal.
If your goal is to make a new, never-before-seen kind of wheel, you definitionally must reinvent the wheel, but at that point, you are doing state of the art research into rolling system dynamics, and probably not hopping onto a message board to ask random strangers about it. You're heading down the hall to your colleagues lab and consulting fellow experts in the field.
If your goal is to learn the rough outline of how a wheel works, because you want to learn to make wheeled vehicles, maybe you should 'reinvent' the wheel at least once, but just as an exercise, not because the wheel you reinvent will be useful. It will be cast aside anyway. You probably just need to know not to put tires on your trains or metal wheels on your F1 cars. If your goal is to reinvent the train, trust the people, who spent years and years of work, testing, reinventing, and retesting the wheel, have proven that round and metal is the way to go for train wheels, and spend your effort on making the train itself. Reinventing the wheels probably won't make a better train and might stall out the making of the train entirely. If your goal is to get a job as a train designer, showing you know how to send specs to the wheel maker and trusting their work will get you hired where getting lost in the minutiae of designing your own unremarkable wheel will not. The people with the money want trains by the end of the day because they promised the client a week ago they'd be ready by yesterday and forgot to hire you until today.