A lot of the fine granularity of Stone's apps comes from the NeXT background, where small specialized apps were tied together with (ta-da) Services much better than under MacOS X. Automator looks to be stepping up to the plate for this in many ways, and of course LinkBack would make it more or less unneeded. (LinkBack is cool, essentially a way of saying "trigger the default Service (open file) for this data using the app that I used to make it in the first place".)
Unix/NeXT philosophy: many small one-shot apps that are chained (Automator) or more interactively connected (Applescript) together to do complex tasks. This happens to a massive degree under the hood of MacOS X, and Stone continues it up to the GUI from their background. I agree that there's a balance point, but on the whole I prefer the toolbox of exquisite small apps.
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