[urschrei]

QGIS isn’t bloated, it’s a big tool for a big problem space. You can’t use “simplified command line things” for a vast majority of GIS tasks, if only because they require visual interactivity.

That having been said, why on earth would you want to use a GUI application to generate raster tiles? The only input required is an extent and a zoom level. Use GDAL or any of ten other free and open-source command-line tools readily available.

It sounds like you’re leaving a dismissive drive-by comment rooted largely in your misunderstanding of a large and complex field with use cases which are largely disjoint. Analysts need GUIs and a lot of different analytics tools. People making web maps don’t.