Often the stuff that "just works" doesn't end up producing a lot of chatter on the intertubes, at least not nearly as much as something that looks seductively simple but turns out to be much harder in practice.

Another example I like is Lua: elegant, mature, and used in some very very big applications. If there was ever evidence that a codebase was high quality and nearly bug free, it's that. But when was the last time we had a good flamewar (with namecalling) over Lua?