Not the OP, but I think there's something in what they're saying. Technically, you can get close to the embedding that the Claris apps used to support with Word

Not the OP, but I think there's something in what they're saying. Technically, you can get close to the embedding that the Claris apps used to support with Word/Excel (although there's no separate vector/bitmap tools with the same integration). You even get something akin to System 7's Publish+Subscribe with Office. At the same time, it feels a lot more fragile now, because the support is coming from Microsoft, it's not as baked into the platform as it was. The OG Mac did a lot of work to support a document paradigm – with features like aliases, stationary pads, publish+subscribe, solid drag+drop and clipboard, spatial Finder, etc. Even where these persist in OS X they're shadows of their past selves. By the time you get to iOS the document paradigm is entirely gone, and you're dealing with app siloes which are ridiculously hard to bridge across. The web, even Google Docs, is similarly focused on the tool, not the output. I'm not sure which paradigm is "better", to be honest. If you take the original document paradigm to its conclusion you end up with OpenDoc, which even if you make allowances for attempting it on underpowered 90s platforms, was probably the wrong direction. But the app paradigm makes composable workflows like OP describes in a sibling comment very difficult or impossible to achieve.