ef6

Well, as soon as you adopt a library it becomes your problem if something is happening. I tend to simplify things as much as possible and using my own code. Doing PoC's to see if i can adopt a certain "thing". So my solution for being "powerlessness" is owning the code i use and therefore I know what it does. I use tools a lot, but also because of that, I'm able to fix issues fast and mostly the error is from my end. For example, i had some slow query generation in EF a couple of years ago and this led to the EF team implementing a Like operator. - https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/115 ( I actually had to debug the library and give a reasonable explanation to the team. They found a solution, that they already considered. Which i think is pretty awesome of them! I use the like operator a lot by now)