the UNIX philosophy died with the advent of the web imo. The emacs editor/Mozilla suite (SeaMonkey) mentality of doing most things and doing them relatively well is the reality we have inherited.
Emacs has always been That Way. And then CERN/Mosaic happened, and browsers (being all-singing, all-dancing environments that do everything from page layout to hosting interpreters and databases, are also big apps) came along.
This has not lead to awk becoming an MUA, or tmux adding a flight simulator, or tee offering to store things as PDFs. Nor has it stopped the development of building-block tools - I still see more nifty new things built with more or less the same assumptions than I can play with.
The only thing I can think of is that you're referring to GUI apps, at least mostly on Linux. GUIs (or more specifically, what Alan Cooper termed 'sovereign applications', but they are mostly GUIs) are typically subject to Zawinski's Law in ways that command line tools are not. Heck, Mutt is somewhat subject to it, itself, for that reason.
Like most pop-philosophy, the Unix philosophy is too vague and subject to interpretation to really be a good guide or yardstick for your projects or ideas.
Its a nice little useful heuristic or reminder to ask yourself if maybe what you are doing is too much.
But maybe what you are doing isn't too much.
That's all it should ever be, IMHO... a reminder to check yourself at some point or another - but its perfectly valid to conclude that your monolithic, large app can and does many things well, and cohesively adds something of value to the software world, that can't or hasn't been accomplished by tiny composable bits, or at least not nearly as well.
Love SDF. (Of course, I run bash and Emacs on it, which will probably earn me a slightly-warmer spot in Hell someday than if I used ksh and vi like God intended.)
