To me the target is being able to adapt. Patterns are not bad in themselves. What make me cringe is the obsession with MVC and derivatives. That's like trying to fit everything that is merely spherical in the "ball" label. That is "ballish", "ballable", "balloid". Maybe it's just not, and being able to take a fresh look on it might open new perspectives.
Looking for one abstraction to rule them all is is like looking for one word to rule them all. Does it make sense ?
Oh, it certainly does. My point on the "one abstraction" was just how fraught that idea is.
On the train home I thought of a retort to the idea of all of this. When it comes to describing a system, there are really only two things I care about. The inputs and the outputs. Anything that obscures either of these in relation to the other is just going to get in the way at some point.
I used to call programming web pages the act of building a giant Rube Goldberg machine where you mix several inputs into building out a web page. I still feel this way, to an extent, but I am hopeful of simple solutions that do not obscure where data comes in and how it goes out. (If that makes sense.)
Seriously, name an item and we can quickly describe some common patterns in them. More interestingly, we can describe different sets of patterns that cover the same item. Depending merely on the vantage of who is looking at it.
I think this is where things get truly difficult in programming patterns. We try to get the one abstraction to rule them all. Not necessarily that easy to do.