> For a community that prides itself on "one small tool for a specific purpose,"

You think this "community" is a tech community? Let alone a unix community? And using a text editor for text processing is definitely aligned with the "unix way" than your way.

> This used to be derided as the microsoft way decades ago.

No. Your way was derided as the microsoft way. The unix way was to treat everything as text! Programs/processes feed/pipe text to each other.