If anyone remembers back before .NET shipped, they might recall that Visual Studio was this package of very separate IDEs ... VB6, VC++, Interdev, FoxPro ... I can't remember anything else ... but they were all pretty separate.  To really learn everything was a pain back then too.  Then there was DNA and COM/DCOM/COM+ and ATL which all took a long, long time to understand.  It wasn't easy then either.  .NET consolidated and simplified things tremendously.  Now, over the past 10 years, things have gotten more complex again, with a ton of libraries.  Now there's more functional programming being incorporated in, and we have 4 UI frameworks instead of 3 (ASP, VB6 forms, VC++ forms then, and now Silverlight, WPF, WinForms, and ASP.NET (well if you count MVC and WebForms as separate, there's 6)).  It's time for another great consolidation effort.  I think it will come, out of necessity.  I thought the technology previously known as Volta, with tier-splitting, might be the answer.