>>Few of the powerful ones, yes. One, no. I'd never limit myself to one, and, yes, choosing the few best tools from a huge rack would be a good strategy.
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>>Just as the electrician doesn't go out with just one screwdriver and pliers, he also doesn't carry all of them. He has picked the tools so that he knows exactly what he has in the bag, and so that with the tools in the bag can do 99% of the work. For tough cases, workaround or get an extra piece from the rack.
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>Except for one vital difference, in the physical world, there is the weight and size of the tools to worry about. In the virtual world of software, there is only a risk of confusion, well I guess weight would be the impact of the utilities on ram and performance. What I mean is in software, there is no reason to have a manual screwdriver. You can have a super-duper powered screwdriver that is every bit as light and adaptable as a "manual" screwdriver.

Yes and no. Just like any other parallel, it keeps its distance ad infinitum. The weight is only in our heads - with today's machines the only difference between "I'm using ten most powerful tools VFP has and ignoring the rest" vs "I'm using whatever VFP has when I feel it helps my app" is in whether all of the 4m or whatever is the weight of the runtime will be cached or not - and I guess most of it would be cached anyway even in the former case.

The weight in the head may matter. We aren't as proficient with everything as with the things we use most. Sometimes we forget there's an extra parameter in some function now, and use a workaround which we developed for VFP8 or 7 or even 6. VFP has hundreds of functions, sys() calls and commands, plus the number of PEMS, classes etc, it's just huge. There may be a better tool among them for almost anything you do, and as the adage goes, if it can't be done three ways in Fox, it isn't worth doing. Do we need to know all three ways for everything? IMO not - we need to know at least one, and even if it isn't the most efficient etc, we've often seen that the difference is in having one or two lines more, wasting 0.2 milliseconds once in a while, and such. Most of the time, that difference is not worth the programmer's time.

So I'm speaking of a toolset consisting of a super-duper screwdriver, semiintelligent wrench, ergonomic multi-pliers (don't execute the poor pun, pardon it) and a few other powerful things to do 90+% of the work, and knowledge that the remaining 400 tools are always at hand if needed to unclog a bottleneck. Not one, not all, but a select set, on a backdrop of a huge cupboard full of others.