[drol3]

I think we can all agree that software should be designed to last :)

My experience tells me that when this fails to happen its usually not explicitly due to too many dependencies. Rather it is because the developers have a poor/partial understanding of the problem domain.

External libraries help this problem a bit because it allows developers to offload tasks onto other more experienced developers. They can (and occasionally will) misuse those solutions, but that is not the dependencies faults. On the contrary skilled developers will produce quality solutions with or without dependencies.

The signal seen (poor software has many dependencies) does not mean that software with dependencies are poor. It means instead that developers who have a poor domain understanding but good business skills are disproportionately successful compared to their peers that have good domain understanding but poor business skills.

Make of that what you will :)