The underappreciated part of the swiss army knife as a metaphor and design principle is that swiss army knives are terrible at everything except Being One Thing, but "being one thing" is _such_ a useful property that a lot of the time - up to some relatively low but hard limits of need and utility - that makes a swiss army knife type tool a practical choice.
@mhoye This is part of why I write my own software at my shop. There were other options (proprietary, expensive, and weird, but generally usable for the tasks they were designed around) before I started on that, but nothing with documented interop and nothing that covered all of what I wanted out of such a system on its own. Writing the thing I wanted seemed more sensible than trying to tape together larger parts that didn't want to talk to each other.
@neal As software metaphors go it's a pretty deep question. You get _so much_ utility in software, so much free simplicity you get, from Being One Thing, especially when the lots-of-things tools were never intended to interoperate in the first place. I'm largely convinced this is why microservices have largely been abandoned as an architectural approach.