zyzhang wrote:
The benefit i got from the design patterns is that they are encourage me to be aware and respect the OO principals on the design of the complex product. The ideas behind the design patterns are related to the design consideration of extensibility, resuability, and etc. These design elements are important when you build complex product from scratch.

Refactoring is XP term, and integrate in the daily development cycle of software process. Good refactoring can result in design patterns(if you can recognize them). This is XP way to compliment the lack of design consideration when you directly go into the coding. So, Refactoring and design patterns are related, and they all are derived from the OO Principles.

Most of the current development environment are built on the high levle of well-known framework. Generally, you give little consideration on the low level design consideration, all you effort are focus on the understanding of the framework and implementing business logic. So, in this case, few design patterns are fall into the developers' eyes.

Design patterns actually help me a lot in the past year. They help me be more sensitive on the problem context and consider using pattern to build the structure of related objects, even though sometime, it's better to make your own variation on the design pattern, but the idea is essentially the same. Also, design patterns are good communication method for the team.

I can imagine, one can ignore the design patterns if you have strong and deep understanding on the OO Principals, also you have good abstract ability and some best practices in your mind.but most of us are not, design patterns instead give us good description on the solution of the common problems.

......