That's not really flippant as those are useful by themselves. All the utility I am advocating does it make the oneliners a bit easier to get to and have context

That's not really flippant as those are useful by themselves. All the utility I am advocating does it make the oneliners a bit easier to get to and have context(i.e. changing the working directory to what you are actually working on) readily available. I would say that a programmer without a decent list of aliases saved up is not the best programmer.