Your Shell and Awk example is funny since simple, single-CPU tools are often faster than the Big Data tools the industry is standardizing on:

http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-tha...

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf

It's true, though, that you should use a more complex tool if it's necessary to get the job done. It's just not clear that the complexity users or developers are dealing with are intrinsic to the problems being solved. It seems more social than anything. :)