I agree, my point is that in practice, patterns encourage that kind of mis-application in many many programmers, and not just the bad ones. The reasons why they

I agree, my point is that in practice, patterns encourage that kind of mis-application in many many programmers, and not just the bad ones. The reasons why they do are part of years-old and still unsolved debates. But I know what I saw: fresh off my love affair with the Lakos C++ book, I though GOF was the next cornerstone of OOP and a must read for everyone. Over the next few years, design debates and proposals where design patterns featured more and more prominently, started turning into bizarre minutiae and half-explored problem discussions. Again, simple and noncritical pieces of software seemed easier to describe and even develop, but the hard stuff became harder to manipulate, overabstracted, took longer to be truly finished (although it got to MVP state faster), and usually much less performant.