The platform problem

I guess the platform problem is so prevalent that it's rarely seen as a separate phenomenon. It's just "the way things are". Everyone has to work with third-party libraries and it's a really rare happy developer that doesn't curse these libraries for brain-damage etc.. Fortunately FOSS is a blessing here. I was recently working on a module based on a well-known caching framework and I was pushing so many fixes to [quite obvious, really] bugs that I was offered direct write access to the repository. Fixing the upstream is so much more joy than piling workarounds in frustration ;)