That romanticizes a vision of Unix that hasn't existed for like four decades, aside from maybe Xenix bitty boxes from Radio Shack servicing two terminals in auto shops, video stores, and the like. People bought Unix workstation and server systems specifically to run large, complex applications. Applications that did many things and kept their configuration in binary blobs or XML files. Stability, security, comprehensiveness, and ease of administration are stronger selling points for these systems than simplicity.

As an example of how comprehensive beats simple in the real world, consider Microsoft Outlook. Not just email, but calendaring and contact management. Microsoft's engineers discovered that in the business world, these things go together and bundled them into one, well-integrated program. Outlook ate everybody's lunch, including Windows-based mail clients like Eudora. Integration with Exchange let these services be provided together on an organizational level, fully integrated with Active Directory, and Exchange came to dominate email server deployments over Unix-based solutions which were more piecemeal. Easier to administrate as well.

NetBSD is a fantastic tinkerer's operating system, one of the most hackable ones out there. But let's not kid ourselves here. The philosophy it supposedly embodies hasn't really served real needs in a long time, if ever. Customers want solutions, not hacks held together with shell and Perl scripts.