>>The medical metaphor I used is pretty classic ... my cousin is a cardiologist and even there you have deeper specialties such as surgery, chronic heart failure, etc. and these specialties tend to fragment more and more.
Of course I agree that medicine increasingly involves subspecialization. But this is because delivery directly to the customer has expanded hugely. Medicine has not become more complicated to deliver the same stuff with a different packet; there are whole new modalities of care that impact directly on patients. Example: endoscopic surgery now is so detailed that there are sub-sub-specialties. The benefit for patients is that surgery that once needed days in hospital and a risky recovery period, now is done almost on a "drive through" basis. IOW the extra complexity for practitioners is mapping into significant new care options for patients. It's not simply more complicated to deliver the same result: they've done away with the abdominal incision completely and the patient gets to go home.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1