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Where Development Is Headed
In addition to the folks who study code and the ones who don't, I see a third group in the middle: They study patterns, but not deeply, and without a sense of history. These folks make a factory for each object, regardless of whether they need a factory, because they don't understand that factories solve a specific problem, and if you don't have that problem, you don't need that solution. They might know about MVC or page objects, and perhaps they use the word pattern, but they don't understand the context and system of forces that make the pattern relevant.
I don't mean to be overly critical here—a lot of people are doing very good work with the general idea of patterns. My point is that, as Jerry Weinberg once said of raspberry jam, "The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets." [8] The fix for this situation is to go to the source. However—dare I say it? Design Patterns can be a tough book to read. A little academic, a little passive, it builds on concepts that it doesn't introduce. Reading Design Patterns won't be enough, either—if you're exposed to it for the first time, you'll likely want to reread Kerievsky, Beck, Fowler, and Martin in light of design patterns. That turns out to be an awful lot of work.
"Do I want to do all this work?" raises a further simple question for you: Do you want to be the person making the mess, or the one cleaning it up? If we all started cleaning up the mess, eventually there would be no mess, and we could just do great work. Wouldn't that be nice?