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I love this analogy.

I don't think it's just you. For my part. I work with companies that require approved suppliers so using any third party software is an admin nightmare. Because of that and the length of my whispy white beard, I have accrued my own software which is unencumbered by other licences and can be used by the aforementioned companies because I am approved. Certainly there are some features that have been added to LabVIEW when before only openG had those features (getting type def info and auto indexing array springs to mind) and Rolfs zip package is much, much faster than NIs. But a lot of the functionality was just replication of NIs (like most of the string functions). There were a few gems in there like the inifile being able to write anything (but I think MGI toolkit outpaced that and besides, I moved to SQLite a while ago now). And, as you mentioned, removing array duplicates and it's ilk. But, like you say, they are not hard to write and the incestuous dependencies means that when you want a banana you get a banana, the gorilla holding the banana, the tree the gorilla sits in and the whole jungle surrounding it. Package that with some BSD 2/3, LGPL, GPL and god knows what else ad nauseum and it makes an otherwise fine package difficult to actually use in anger.

Link is now dead, they got the feedback I guess. Well, the feedback that this particular install is bad. Not the feedback of "maybe you should test these installers before uploading them" ?

We use a PreBuild action, which can set the build number of an EXE to the SVN commit version. This means that we'll have software 1.3.1.384 where commit 384 is the source that made that EXE. Having it in the EXE means Windows can tell me what version it is even if I can't run my application and get to an About Screen. It isn't seamless but it works well enough.

NI doesn't know everything.