[TZubiri]

"Maybe if Photoshop and MS Word used the same dedicated underlying binary/application to read and process the png"

The unix philosophy is to do one thing and do it well, it doesn't need to conform with expectations about each binary achieving low-level tasks.

What even would be "reading and processing pngs"? Sounds like a dumb technical way to divide responsibilities. I rather have responsibilities of apps be user-defined like "editing images" and "writing documents".

The unix philosophy precedes the development of the UNIX ecosystem, it's anachronistic to understand an OS based on how applications ended up interpreting it.

It's like conflating a constitution of a country for its laws.

[vimsee]

I still stand by my previous answer.