"I feel that solid programming abstractions and patterns are essential for software development. "

Yeah, I feel exactly the same. To me object oriented programming as served by C++/Java/C# is good and fine for building abstractions over existing systems.

System design however, is served much better by thinking the system in terms of fundamental data structures, graphs and relational models rather than as an obtuse object hierarchy of some sort. This is my main gripe with GoF - it's used as a some sort of toolbox for software design when actually it just explains how to convert familiar and non-seremonial idioms from other languages to C++'s verbosity. If the student is not exposed to software construction in these other languages and just to GoF he/she is missing on so much (I know I did, at least).

But this is just my personal preference, maybe someone else writes much better software when thinking in objects but for me my initial years as a programmer were basically wasted in trying to build beautiful object hierarchies out of everything.

I write mostly C++ as my day job. Software modules which are built by embracing the C++ object model to it's full extent are the most horrible stuff I have to deal with :)

I think the complaint is basically that the majority of GoF patterns are better solved simply by having first class functions, and many students won't realize this because they only know languages without them, so they never develop an intuition for seeing such simple ways of solving problems, and instead build complicated machinery to do trivial things. And GoF tends to legitimize this approach in their minds.

It's a good book, but it's not a book for beginners.