Sometimes monkey patching is good actually. I use Soap4r all the time, and I preferred the debug xml to appear in the console rather than created as a separate

Sometimes monkey patching is good actually. I use Soap4r all the time, and I preferred the debug xml to appear in the console rather than created as a separate file, it was really easy to make a monkey patch that fixed this, without modifying the actual distribution... that way other projects wouldn't be affected. Another time, there was a small bug in Hpricot, rather than fix it directly in source, I patched it in my code, and removed the patch when the fix was in the production stream. At least it's nice to have that option available...