I agree that before monkeypatching, a team should weigh their options. But for many projects, "fixing the socket libraries" could be a lot of work, or not an option at all.

In the example I gave, you'd have to rewrite whatever database drivers you're using, or at least hack them to work in a non-blocking fashion. That could have just as much development cost as monkeypatching.

zodiac is an attempt to address the problems that make monkeypatching such a risky, unpredictable option, by making patches smaller and therefore using more system code. Hopefully, for situations where monkeypatching is necessary, I can make it cleaner and more maintainable.