>>27
You most likely suffer from terminal Unixitis (pun intended) or Stockholm syndrome.
>>29
Indeed, the Unix pipeline utopia is great. But it breaks down as soon as you try to do anything but filter ridiculously simply formatted text. The system doesn't efficiently support filtering pictures or sounds and edition of source code.
ImageMagick reinvents the a pipeline model. The GIMP is a monolith. Emacs is a big ball of mud. All those programs completely disregard the Unix philosophy because it isn't suited to anything barely complex.
And the most horrible thing is that instead of recognising this, Unixers prefer to invent stupid rules such as “editable text configuration”, base64 and “email lines are 76 characters long” in order to coerce the world into their “plain text” fanaticism. (Hint: plain text doesn't exist.)
Your example is completely irrealistic by the way.