Noob Cook Questions

[shinma6980]

Alright, so I want to try my hand at cooking up a ROM. The main reason behind this is that there are some great ROMs here already but they take out certain programs that I want to keep in or little changes that I don't really like. I know that there are other (very few) people like me out there that wouldn't mind keeping the stock Sprint ROM but they want things like the FM Radio and faster SYS files.

So my first question is this: Is it possible to deconstruct a ROM and just replace/add certain files ie SYS files and whatnot? I know it is just what all programs would I need? Just BuildOS?

Second, instead of deconstructing the stock Sprint ROM would it just be easier to talk to some of the experienced cookers around here and work with them to modify their ROM for the options I want - which I guess would lead back to question 1.