[rhizome31]

While I agree that the GoF book is way overrated, I think you're being a bit harsh. Most of the patterns are actually tricks to overcome limitations of statically-typed class-based languages like C++ and Java. They can be useful in these languages but are not necessary with dynamic languages. Take Strategy for instance, with Python or JS, we'd just use a callback but in old Java you couldn't do that, hence the need for a more complicated technique. Creational patterns also mostly fall in this category. Some are so trivial (Template Method, Adapter), that it's hard to understand why they make them such a big deal.

Among the few patterns that are more generally useful and have stood the test of time, we'd find Composite, Command and of course Observer.