My aesthetic pleasure in engineering is more the means than the ends; nobody pays me to go on HN, so the latter is what I focus on :).

Every recording studio or both for a live venue I've seen always seems to have 'round 1/4 equipment always in use, 1/4 rarely but sometimes used, 1/2 equipment never used :P. I really do respect the science and art that goes into audio engineering, but damn that's a lot of clutter.

Now the flip side is it's a lot easier to trim the fat administering a bunch of a computers (and the clutter isn't a huge sunk cost like some once highly valuable piece of equipment one might be loath to chuck), and yet this ideal is also far from realized most the time. Boxes in closet are just a lot more obvious than files in a directory.