fwiw, I totally agree with everything you've written, and take it in good faith. I've heard the words "power tool" and "platform" used to describe what you're

fwiw, I totally agree with everything you've written, and take it in good faith. I've heard the words "power tool" and "platform" used to describe what you're talking about. The best tools have a simple core with many silos, but those silos are highly-configurable and composable. You can call it UNIX-philosophy, but it's evidently existed in other domains (carpentry, baking, "interchangeable parts" in manufacturing) for a very long time. I don't think there's a lot of software written this way. Vi, Excel, UNIX pipes, functional programming languages, regular expressions, GNU ledger, Redis come to mind. Not a lot of consumer software fits this description, that I can think of.