I've been building a lot of custom functionality over the last few weeks on top of the GMap module for Drupal, but was constantly pushing the limits of the module and finally decided to drop it completely. The module still uses v2 of the GMaps API, which is officially deprecated, and the module abstracts the GMaps API into its own API, probably making it easier to do direct PHP-to-map logic but adding unnecessary complexity when client-side API code is needed. (That's needed for anything the module doesn't implement, which is a lot.) The more custom code I wrote, the less value the module seemed to be providing, to the point that it seems like more of a hindrance than a utility now.

So I decided to switch to a custom implementation of GMaps API v3. To get the data out of Drupal, it seemed like json_server (a supplement to Services) would be a robust way of building the map data as a private web service to feed into the client-side map building code. But json_server is absurdly buggy: I had to create and/or apply 2 patches (Use drupal_json instead of drupal_to_js and Error response failure) just to get it to work properly, and other patches like Use Drupal.settings.basePath to apply other best practices. Two hours to get a module that's been out since July 2007 to work is absurd IMHO.

I don't know if this is a general trend of just my experience lately, but I feel like so much of the contrib Drupal code I've tried lately has been really lacking. The whole Drupal development experience seems to have gone downhill the last few months. I hope that changes soon, but the delays with the D7 release make me wonder if there's something fundamentally wrong with the Drupal community's development model.