It's difficult to come up with the optimal workflow on the first try. So an API should typically start out flexible even at the expense of complexity, in order to enable experimentation, and then you can optimize to make the common case simple, once you know what the common case is.

Sure but that common case should go into the core APIs, not an MCP.

agreed lots of ppl writing mcp as a lipstick on the pig.

MCP is exactly the lipstick we needed to put on our pigs, APIs that is not ours, but open source tools we use internally and also wanted to expose to our agents.

Yea my company is willing to pour money into an MCP but has concretely resisted attempts to improve or care about the API for years.