Maybe this will change your opinion. I recalling helping rescue a government software project that was horribly behind schedule. One of the many issues being

Maybe this will change your opinion. I recalling helping rescue a government software project that was horribly behind schedule. One of the many issues being an e-learning system for a state department of education. Their CMS (Blackboard) was fronted by a forward HTTP proxy/cache/load-balancer that was misbehaving but near-impossible to debug. Details a bit hazy now but I recall it being a hairball of poorly written java. I ripped that out and replaced it with Squid and some rewrite code. HTTP intermediate services are easy to write, but operate in a hostile and chaotic environment; they are very very hard to make reliable, performant, interoperable, secure, forgiving, and compliant. To achieve that and still have elegant code is really something so yay Varnish. I'm a bit of a fan of the Dovecot mail server source for similar reasons (but I'm biased, having made a small contribution and got into the authors file)