Well, there are many collections of patterns, GoF doesn't claim to be exhaustive. Enterprise Integration Patterns is more high level, for example. But for everyone who hand waves away something like the Strategy pattern as trivial, I have to work with a dozen libraries which accept a massive dictionary of static options to configure their behaviour instead of allowing me to choose an arbitrary, dynamic policy at runtime. I don't think that's a conscious design decision on behalf of most API developers. I suspect it's because the industry largely received the original GoF book as a bunch of cut and pasteable code and later rejected it as symptomatic of Java-esque OO excess. We could instead have received it as a network of signposts telling us what's possible, when and why. Not earth-shattering stuff (neither is Christopher Alexander's original) but useful nonetheless.