Recently I was involved in a discussion of "mastering one special vs. jack of all trades." The point of it all is that both schools and employers today were pushing specialization over generalization resulting — in the opinion of some — in a legion of workers who "can’t see the forest for the trees." They are focused on their narrow area of expertise, know their stuff well, but have no idea how their little piece of the puzzle fits in with what everyone else is doing. Engineering/construction and auto mechanics were the main fields used as examples but the idea could apply to many areas, including desktop publishing and even desktop publishing software.

Is it more desirable to specialize (Identity design, Web design, Newsletter design…) or to be able to "do it all?" When it comes to software, is it better to have an arsenal of specialized applications or a program that lets you do everything from start to finish without ever needing a separate word processor, graphics editor, PDF creator, or other utility?