Dick I appriciate your feedback, so I have added a new section based on your comment here, which I hope clarifies my point better. It may be my fault, but I don't think you picked up the point I tried to get across. I added a section called "Should Always The Most Primitive Tool Be Used?" which I hopes clarifies better.

I think your impression from what I wrote was that we should use the most bare bones solution possible, but that was not what I tried to say.

You should absolutely use new innovations. And as I hope I made clear in the final section "This is Not a Blueprint for Your Developer Career," I am not advocating this as a general solution. Thus I think calling my position "arrogant and wasteful" is kind of mean.

I made it very clear in this last section, that this is MY preference based on both my skills, limits and abilities as a developers. Your abilities and preferences may differ.

I clarified what it is about me, that makes me make those choices. Your skillset and personality may be quite different and so a different optimal choice may apply.

The whole purpose of this article was not to sort of at gun point tell everybody they are idiot and they should do like me. Rather it was to defend my particular choice of how to go about software development. I frequently see many people who question those of us who try to avoid feature rich IDEs and heavier languages.

There seems to be this assumption that we are somehow clueless and don't know what is out there. That our choice is just based on ignorance. I am trying to make the case that we know what is out there but we still choose to do things different. Part of the reason for that is that we happen to place a very strong emphasis on the value on simplicity.

That is not only due to the inherent value of simplicity but often due to our own limitations. If you know about yourself that you don't have a sharp memory and cannot keep a lot of things in your head at the same time e.g. then you should adopt your workflow to do that.

My point is that there is no silver bullet. You use the tools that works within the constrains of your abilities. Choose simple over convient does not make you clueless or unware of how "real" software development works.