To my mind, the "dumb" tools are the simple ones that often ship w/ Unix, and using them forces understanding of principles, rather than rote memorization of me

To my mind, the "dumb" tools are the simple ones that often ship w/ Unix, and using them forces understanding of principles, rather than rote memorization of meta-commands. From that (the hope is that) one can _understand_ what a problem is, and now to fix it.