A very nice example in my eyes is Serre's proof of Riemann-Roch:
Sometimes, you are just not satisfied with existing proofs, and you look for better ones, which can be applied in different situations. A typical example for me was when I worked on the Riemann-Roch theorem (circa 1953), which I viewed as an "Euler-Poincare" formula (I did not know then that Kodaira-Spencer had had the same idea.) My first objective was to prove it for algebraic curves - a case which was known for about a century! But I wanted a proof in a special style; and when I managed to find it, I remember it did not take me more than a minute or two to go from there to the 2-dimensional case (which had just been done by Kodaira).
He is speaking, of course, of the sheaf-theoretic proofs, which are usually presented today. This was the period where he was working on FAC, GAGA and his duality theorem, which revolutionized algebraic geometry.
