Sometimes things have subtle bugs that it takes a long time to track down. This happens less often when they're well written, but it still does happen. And when it happens, the bug fix is often just one line. It's a frustrating experience, but sometimes still worthwhile.
Also, though, I don't think that needing only 1024 lines of code to wire your system into RabbitMQ is any kind of indictment of the quality of RabbitMQ or of the code being wired into it. It would be even less of an indictment if it was only 128 lines or 16 lines or 1 line. But sometimes you need to grok a whole new paradigm; if you've never worked with AMQP before, you probably aren't going to be able to write those 16 lines in half an hour.
Similar comments apply to other domains with well-developed libraries for them. OpenCV, BLAS, regular expressions, LALR parsers, SQL databases, GNU MathProg, and so on: if you haven't worked with them before, it's probably going to take you a while to learn enough about them to apply them to your problem, and then you're going to produce an extremely small amount of code to actually use them. But that doesn't mean your time learning about them was wasted; quite the contrary.
Also, though, I don't think that needing only 1024 lines of code to wire your system into RabbitMQ is any kind of indictment of the quality of RabbitMQ or of the code being wired into it. It would be even less of an indictment if it was only 128 lines or 16 lines or 1 line. But sometimes you need to grok a whole new paradigm; if you've never worked with AMQP before, you probably aren't going to be able to write those 16 lines in half an hour.
Similar comments apply to other domains with well-developed libraries for them. OpenCV, BLAS, regular expressions, LALR parsers, SQL databases, GNU MathProg, and so on: if you haven't worked with them before, it's probably going to take you a while to learn enough about them to apply them to your problem, and then you're going to produce an extremely small amount of code to actually use them. But that doesn't mean your time learning about them was wasted; quite the contrary.