Many free/open-source advocates have been complaining about NIH syndrome for years and years and years... to no avail.

Consider, for example, the situation with window managers and desktop environments. Off the top of my head, we have Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, Openbox, dwm, Gala, KWin, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, JWM, and Ratpoison -- to name only 12 of the remarkably large number available for Linux. I suspect there are well over 100 window managers/desktop environments for Linux actively used in the wild today. And that's just window managers/desktop environments.

The number of people who have complained over the decades about this proliferation is... quite large. The number of words that have been written and spoken in waste, and the number of flame wars that have raged on, over which particular choice is best is also... remarkably large. Search for "Gnome versus KDE" or "Unity versus Gnome" if you want to see some examples.

I've come to accept this is The Way of free/open-source software.

On the flip side, some people love all this variety and choice.