Well, read back what I wrote and think about it a bit.

Those countless projects you mention, that were abandoned; if the code exists they are not dead, someone could continue if she deemed it useful. You could do it yourself if you really needed the said application but it seems to me you don't need it badly enough...

So it seems to be those can be classified to the category "projects that deserve to die"


There are countless examples of quickly hacked stuff that is done just because someone needs it for any given reason at that moment. When that is no longer needed it is abandoned but if it ever was published so that the code is "out there", and as much as you seem to hate the idea, someone might well use parts of it for whatever reason later, come the need.

The important thing here is that writing software is not hard, just about anyone can hack up code suitable for a task at hand; it's just defining what you want to have and executing on that plan. Hence there exist code of so varying quality.
it's very much like playing a musical instrument; some can do it beautifully and some manage just to find some chords..