It's all been done before: Memes vs. Borrowing

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Blasted lands are older than that, check out the grail myths.

 

[Desdichado]

My first thought was also to question the use of the word meme; a word that, like trope, is very widely mis-used by gamers who don't actually know what it means, but get kinda close by hearing it used by someone else, trying to define it within it's context and then end up spreading its misuse amongst online gamers everywhere. Meme-like, even.

But to your actual question, yeah, that has happened to me. I skipped Dark Sun back in the day, developed my own homebrew more recently, came across the back-isses of Dragon and Dungeon magazines that did Dark Sun, read some more about it, and found out that my own homebrew feels like a rip-off of it in many key areas.

Oh well.