This is quite acceptable, IMNSHO. If you're reinventing a wheel, of course you need to know why your predecessors have not used the Obvious Simple Shortcut That Intuitively Makes Sense. Was it not available back when this was written? Was it to keep compatibility with Windows XP? Or perhaps your idea really did not occur to the developers.

Most time - when reimplementing stuff - is not spent coding, or even debugging, but on research.