[mtbcoder]

"No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)."

This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.

[SwellJoe]

But, I need more than one thing on my websites. Sure, you can have many disparate parts all doing their one thing well ..but the user experience for that often sucks. Controlling notifications from four different tools in four different places is deeply user hostile, for example, and that's the situation I'd be putting my users in for our website (unless I built a unified notification UI for forums, content, tickets, and store applications). Likewise unifying logins/sessions is often a nightmare (I've done it but don't like doing it). Handling spam across multiple tools that allow user content, etc. There are big costs to single-purpose tools. For some folks the cost is worth paying.