Anything that encourages ideological movements among ignorant people is bad, and design patterns do just that, from what I've seen.

I've seen grown men spend hours and hours and hours talking about AbstractFactory patterns. I've seen, to a degree, that your ability to discuss the implementation of AbstractFactories can influence your reputation more than the software that actually gets created.

I've been hearing a lot of criticism against GoF lately, and I think now I understand why: IMHO I believe that since the past decade or so we moved up one step above the "complexity chain". Nowadays we hugely rely on frameworks to develop code, and therefore we don't need to think in terms of design patterns as much as before. However, one level down in this chain (at the framework level) design patterns are heavily used behind the scenes. Even at the language level (iterators, for example, came from GoF).

In summary, nowadays we don't need to rely on design patterns so heavily, but the frameworks we use still rely on them.

I think you'd really have to botch things if you ended up with code that was MORE boilerplate after utilizing design patterns. By their very nature they are intended to promote highly cohesive and lowly coupled code..

The real issue hackers have with members of the Design Patterns cult (other than the ridiculous jargon) is the notion that complex, generalized patterns are ALWAYS better than simple, specific solutions to a problem.