User blog comment:Kenetron/Creative Thinking/@comment-5035765-20140612185755/@comment-24087642-20140612230843

Basically this.

However, since the prices are really low here (total less than a B.F. sword), it could make sense to build doran's into these if you knew that you weren't going to get enough gold to get real items because you messed up early game.

In the end though, the decision on when rather than if to sell doran's is more interesting.

And even if doran's had a really bad item to build into, they'd need to be nerfed slightly, which could ruin their identity as the items you buy for early game only.