[TUHS] Proliferation of options is great simplification of pipes, really?

All, So, we've been talking low-level design for a while. I thought I would ask a fundamental question. In days of old, we built small single-purpose utilities and used pipes to pipeline the data and transformations. Even back in the day, it seemed that there was tension to add yet another option to every utility. Today, as I was marveling at groff's abilities with regard to printing my man pages directly to my printer in 2021, I read the groff(1) page: example here: https://linux.die.net/man/1/groff What struck me (the wrong way) was the second paragraph of the description: The groff program allows to control the whole groff system by command line options. This is a great simplification in comparison to the classical case (which uses pipes only). Here is the current plethora of options: groff [-abcegilpstzCEGNRSUVXZ] [-d cs] [-f fam] [-F dir] [-I dir] [-L arg] [-m name] [-M dir] [-n num] [-o list] [-P arg] [-r cn] [-T dev] [-w name] [-W name] [file ...] Now, I appreciate groff, don't get me wrong, but my sensibilities were offended by the idea that a kazillion options was in any way simpler than pipelining single-purpose utilities. What say you? Is this the perfected logical extension of the unix pioneers' work, or have we gone horribly off the trail. Regards, Will