I was with you, till your second paragraph and how the Unix philosophy has always suggested using brute force first. I don't believe this is so, can you provide any such evidence? Unix has never had such a philosophy.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the move to use shell builtins rather than spawning processes for say `true` (as the most extreme example) could easily be considered an example of Unix having started with brute force and having become more elegant.