Sadly, days when programming was at least attempted to be treated as a well structured engineering discipline are long gone. Today we are bombarded with new "paradigms", new "frameworks", new reinvented wheels every day, all hastily clobbered together as if nothing before them existed. Good engineering does not work that way. Innovation is neccesary (not appearance of innovation), but so is building upon prior art. If engineers built bridges the way software is constructed, they would all be beautiful, looking as if they came from a fairy tale or Star Wars cities, but would collapse with the first bird alighting on them...

In other words, I am with you.

I agree that open source offers, at least theoretically, a way out of a situation like the one you describe. However, I will take this as the opportunity for a bit of a tangential rant on my pet peeve about most of OS development:

There are hundreds of simple text editors on sourceforge. There are countless application development frameworks, web UI toolsets, data abstraction or persistence layers... Most of them unfinished. Is the author of text editor #1001 certain that his ideas are so radical that the best way to express them is to write a totally new program, instead of improving one of previous 1000? Another symptom of this is a typical description of version n+1 of many things: "Total rewrite of version n". Don't people design things any more!? (Countless books on refactoring, agile methods, extreme programming ets do seem to discourage design and thinking things out before starting to bang away on the keyboard. Other source of poor software is opposite: slavish adherence to "design patterns" without really understanding them... )

How many universally useful, widely accepted and relied upon OS products are there: Linux itself, Apache (but not all of their countless, short-lived sub-projects), PostgreSQL and MySQL, Perl, Python and PHP, JBoss, perhaps a dozen more. Pretty little, given enormous talent and time that goes into it. Granted, there are zillions of particular, niche itches that got succesfully scratched by efforts of most often a single person (like our Hijack, jEmplode and others), but still...

Please, OS hackers, devote your time and energy to quality, not sheer quantity of software!