Software
Incredible messes in the software world:
SQL99/SQL3/SQL2003/SQL-XML
Web Services/SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/ebXML
Semantic Web/RDF/CDF/RSS/XML-RPC

I won't go into details about why these things are such messes. Life is too short, and there are too many interesting and worthwhile things to learn. But I will ask this question: Have any of the players (standards organizations, gurus, big companies, etc.) involved in any of the above produced anything simple, easy to use, and/or worthy of broad, large-scale adoption recently? As usual, the really interesting stuff is happening outside of the standards mainstream - weblogs being one obvious example.

Funny how so many of these things are tangled up, in one way or another, with XML. XML is here to stay, and it's very useful in some contexts. But the drive to make it the panacea for every problem in computing is doomed to failure. Perhaps I'm just getting old and crotchety. Then again, perhaps it all reminds me of the other failures I've seen in my career (CASE tools, Network Computers, Object-Oriented Databases, CMM, "Push" technology, CORBA, 4GL's, ASP's, etc.).

Things that are not as messy: (note that I don't think less messy is necessarily a good thing)
.NET
LAMP