There is lots of exciting stuff going on (DbC and PEX for C#, for example), but none of it is exactly in the mainstream. My personal peeve is not that there is

There is lots of exciting stuff going on (DbC and PEX for C#, for example), but none of it is exactly in the mainstream. My personal peeve is not that there is too much abstraction, but the fact that people seem to gladly settle for mediocre solutions that require lots of work to do trivial things. I was in the situation where implementing SOAP server from scratch was an order of magnitude easier than figuring how to deploy the existing, standard Java technologies in that particular environment. That's just plain wrong.