There appears to be some discrepancy in the interpretation and use of some terminology. To clarify, what many of us refer to as bloat has nothing at all to do

There appears to be some discrepancy in the interpretation and use of some terminology. To clarify, what many of us refer to as bloat has nothing at all to do with run time resource usage, but instead relates to unnecessary features and complexity. We see freedom and beauty in short, clean, simple code, small utilities and terse specifications. These are seldom the most efficient (computationally) solution to any particular problem, but these tools are small (in terms of code, possibly binary), and therefore easy to implement and maintain as well as understand. And we can easily replace such tools if necessary; we don't become excessively dependent on giant code bases. When computational resources permit it, we prefer to get rid of optimizations to simplify these tools internally. A bloated tool might have a million features, it can be many times as efficient at some things, it can probably do more. But it is likely to be hard to modify, a pain to maintain, difficult to port, and diagnosing problems gets harder with more complicated tools. As soon as you start using half of its features, you become very dependent on that particular tool. And you probably cannot replace it, it would be too much work. Your freedom suffers. More often than not, we can get our jobs done with simple and small tools. Thus the big and complicated tool is filled with unnecessary things; it is bloated.