You could also spend that developer time trying to untangle code reuse between various components, or the more subtle breakages caused by changes that don't account for the expectations of all callers. Code reuse is still a tradeoff.
It should be noted that generic code is harder to break. It is, by definition, less entangled with its callers. There are also fewer operations you can do with generic parameters, so there are fewer ways to screw up.
