Why is TeX such a mess?

The simplest, modern route to using T_EX is to download TeX Live, but it's such a huge mess. Even the lightest installation can be hundreds of megabytes, and there are so many files it needs its own package management system.

Why can't I just download pdftex and run pdftex foo.tex and get a PDF? Why is there so much cruft for what is supposed to be ``traditional'' UNIX software?

>>5
This is why ``Micro languages'' are bad.
I think its time we make a unified language for describing all graphical programming instead of having to learn a million different micro languages for doing such tasks. This applies to all areas of graphical interface programming such as web programming, GUI toolkits and text formatting in word processing programs. We should be using a unified hierarchical language like XML or such. We already see this happening, QT is switching to JSON, MS wants all its GUI programming done in HTML5/CSS.