This week I (re-)read the Anti-Patterns book, which I first read more than 10 years ago. The idea of Anti-Patterns is that there are various unproductive behavior modes in software engineering which result in similar problems, and can be treated in similar ways. This book is well worth a review now and again.
I think the anti-pattern most relevant to the netCDF libraries is Project Mismanagement, for which I blame no one other than myself. ;-0
It's interesting that the solution to this anti-pattern, risk analysis, is something that is already underway for future netCDF releases.