The buzz of the week is Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List.

While useful as are many of Scott's posts I find the list waaay overcrowded and overloaded. Some people bothered to count and found 120 (count 'em - 120) tools! I bet if you eliminated the "duplicates" you'd reach a more reasonable and maintainable number. Why maintainable? Well, accidents happen and you might need to reinstall your whole OS, except that now you have a list of 120 developer utilities on top of God knows how many other utilities you need...

Notice for example that in the The Angle Bracket Tax group, features of several products largely overlap or are a pure subset of one bigger tool - XMLSpy absolutely dominates this category; if you can afford it, most (if not all) your XML/XSD/XSLT/SOAP related problems will be solved.

I see the tool overload problem similar to the problem of too many methods in a class (or better yet, interface). As much as you want your class to have more functionality you probably want even more that it remains usable and maintainable. I can't imagine a class having that many methods (120) even though I've seen some cases where this number comes dangerously close. For a thorough treatment of this see Herb Sutter's Exceptional C++ Style, Item 38: Monoliths “Unstrung,” Part 2: Refactoring std::string.

Don't take this as a stance against usage of proper tools - in fact, I already wrote about this issue some time ago - Importance of good tools. I just wanted to point out that when picking right tools for the job, one should make sure that while the toolset is functional and complete it should also be minimal.