I know you to be a confident programmer, but unless you're a guru, I respectfully disagree with that assessment.
I think the popularity of the book and the patterns movement amongst both academics and professionals fully demonstrates many intelligent and normal people have learned a lot from the analysis, and as you pointed out, learned a lot about communicating some fundamental patterns in OO software with a standard vocabulary. Essentially where I disagree is you apparently place patterns somewhat on par (or just above) with basic OO concepts, i.e. encapsulation, polymorphism, etc. I hate putting words into anyone's mouth, but you dismiss patterns as if you're a genius (and I'm not saying you aren't).
In conclusion, a programmer would have to read thousands upon thousands of lines of well written code to learn many of the GoF and other patterns in the literature (as an aside, what's the percentage of production code that would be considered well written? Which patterns in source code do you adopt?). Like I suggested in the previous post, I can't see even the above-average B+ programmer having an excellent grasp of a majority of the patterns out there without years of hard-learned practice collaborating with other talented coders. Programmers are somewhat well-known for taking shortcuts. In this case, patterns are a shortcut to solving various common problems in designing OO software. Why reinvent the wheel yourself through years of practice when the literature is already there?
One last point. I think the readability and the full admission by the GoF that the patterns they've published are not novel (remember that's the essential quality of patterns: they are well known and reused) is one of its best selling points. Not everybody (but God himself, Don Knuth) writes TAOCP and not everybody reads it either. I think precisely where we disagree is that you feel well known means most good coders with some experience already know them just from day to day work.
