Someone should invent a name for this problem. It's the reason we get a zillion test frameworks, untold thousands of database layers and uncountable reimplementations of linked lists. I can't get through the code of a sufficiently large system without running into someone's crappy command line option parser package, more likely two or three. Don't get me started on rewrites of functions that are already in the library (strcmp, I'm looking at you).

"All these existing packages are terrible; nothing that exists measures up. I'm going to write my own that is just going to /rock/."

That seems to be the issue; a low bar for entry, and it's hard to wade through the spam and the chaff of stuff that's already around and find something that will work well. It's a little like the satellite debris problem we have in LEO right now; there's an inflection point beyond which the sea of junk starts spawning new garbage.

Basically, when you have programmers, you get code. For years that was Microsoft's problem ("We have all these people, and they just won't. stop. typing! Augggh!")