I've experienced (and created) exactly those weighty, oppressive test suites. I think that they're probably more a symptom of us collectively learning to test t

I've experienced (and created) exactly those weighty, oppressive test suites. I think that they're probably more a symptom of us collectively learning to test than anything else. Even today, there are very few people who are experts at test isolation; five years ago there were almost none. It's tempting to give up in situations like that, but I like to think back to "GOTO Considered Harmful". It was contentious at the time! There were people who literally thought that you couldn't build complex software systems without GOTO. It's a reminder that we always underestimate how good we can get at something, and how much freedom we'll have after adopting a constraint.