The basics are never outdated. Minimalist code means less to break, data usage patterns are best optimized by caching, short-circuit evals and branch prediction, and clean coding habits like proper indentation, verbose function & variable names, and meaningful comments without commenting the obvious will do more for bug prevention than entire hard drive full of tools. As you noticed, I'm rabidly anti-bloat... Comes from starting out programming a 4040 processor with 127 bytes of addressable RAM (top byte was used as a stack pointer) using nine toggle switches and a push-button. I used to do code in 127 bytes that today I'd be lucky to get a 1 meg executable to do. Ah, a Jersey boy... ... and sports - passtime of the feeble-minded. (I hate the sox and the pats too, because it turns people into drunk loudmouth wife-beating ... well, I'll stop there) ... and what is this MTV of which you speak? Is that anything like DiBol? Ah say, Ah say, that's a joke son.
Amen to that! I tell every client my motto is, the less moving parts, the less chance it has to break. Ah, you're real old school. When I was PEEKing and POKEing on my Vic 20 with 3k of RAM and just beggining to learn Assembly you were probably already well into OOP.