We just starting hitting a bug in NHibernate where objects are GC'd that shouldn't, and it crashes. It was fixed in a newer version, so we updated. This minor update changed the way a bunch of queries work (optimisations that fail when a certain feature is used), and we've had to roll back. We either have Bug A or Bug B.
> How is abandoned 3rd party code any worse than code you wrote yourself?
I understand code I wrote myself and can easily fix bugs. The lsat thing I want to do when I find a bug in a 3rd party library is spend weeks debugging their code because it's been abandoned. In many cases it's a false economy.
> 3rd party code is almost always a win
I don't think you've worked on enough codebases you didn't write that are years old and had hundreds of dependencies pulled in without any thought; especially in something with no sound type-system like JS :O(
Try upgrading jQuery when you've got 150 jQuery plugins that have been abandoned and/or don't work in the new version of IE :-/