[dan-robertson]

This might be a preference revealed in which libraries people choose but I think it is not really exhibited in the kind of libraries or code that people write. You aren’t seeing the vast majority of libraries that aren’t convenient because they don’t get released as open source or become popular.

In my experience, some of the projects which have been most valuable have been those which follow a theme of ‘do something really horrible or annoying inside our program so that the users don’t need to deal with the nastiness’. For example it might mean having to write code with some unpleasant hacks or in a very weird way to fit underlying apis or performance requirements; or it could mean spending a bunch of time manually tuning some heuristics because those heuristics improve the library.