It strikes me that this is really at the root of at least some of the &#x27;front-end&#x27; problems we&#x27;ve been discussing in recent submissions.<p>It feels a bit like going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant and eating both too much, and insisting on trying everything they have on the menu. As a result, you might get sick from overeating and from mixing food that you shouldn&#x27;t mix. And while such behavior is human nature, and while it <i>can</i> be argued that this alone is a good reason to avoid such a restaurant in the first place, it can also be argued that much of the problem could be avoided by applying a little more restraint.<p>Gulp might be great in some cases, but why not use the &#x27;npm script&#x27; approach until you need it? Installing packages for everything is seductive and just one command away, but it&#x27;s not all that different from the cut-and-paste-from-stack-overflow programming that most of us learned to avoid.<p>Now I&#x27;m not saying that the problems in the &#x27;front-end ecosystem&#x27; aren&#x27;t real. I&#x27;m sure they are as I still run into them even though I try to be very conservative these days, and I&#x27;m sure many of the complaints are from people who are better coders than I am.<p>But at least for myself, my Node.js work has become significantly more fun, and has involved significantly less &#x27;grunt work&#x27; (heh) by simply avoiding the urge to add yet another dependency, API or tool &quot;just because it&#x27;s there&quot;.