Sure, untrammeled neophilia is a problem too, but that's not what we're discussing here, either. No one is saying that MV* is never useful, only that it's not the be-all end-all that the comment I chose to interrogate presented it as being.

If we were discussing untrammeled neophilia, though, I'd note that in a fast-moving field it merits the professional to keep up a lively familiarity with the new tools which will likely soon deprecate the old, and it likewise merits the organization invested in such a field to avoid letting that investment grow so stale that it becomes difficult to find good people to work with it. There's really nothing here that hasn't happened with almost any other software specialization over the last few decades. It's only that it happens faster now, because everything happens faster now. There can be a certain fatigue in that, and from the outside - or from the perspective of one who has suddenly noticed that the world has moved on while he has not - it can seem as though there's nothing to it but new shiny things for new shiny things' sake.

I have not found it so; instead I find that today's tools enable those who know how to use them to do more things, better, and faster, than yesterday's tools could support - and I confide that tomorrow's tools will improve the situation still further. But perhaps my own perspective is the one that's flawed.