Rob Pike gave an interesting talk when unix hit a 1E9 seconds. In it he mentions the dropping of good combinable tools for big software suites (this just reared its ugly head again). With REST rising in adoption, doing things like alias wcat="lynx -dump" may make sense instead of having to use a browser. As for editing, learning vim gets you a little closer to knowing how to use sed. ;)

The big downside to Rob's talk lies with his unhappiness with the lost productivity due to people re-inventing the wheel (too many distros, too many similar programs); all that expensive diversity means we get lots of crazy ideas being tried, and the good ideas percolate out rapidly.